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A 

"Temporary Gentleman" 
in France 

Home Letters from an Officer at 
the Front 



With Introductory Chapters by- 
Captain A* J. Dawson 

Border Regiment (British Forces) 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Gbe iftnfckerbocfter press 

1918 






Copyright, 191 8 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



APR 23 (918 

Ube fmicfcerbocfeet press, Hew HJorft 

A497019 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

Permission has been given by the British War 
Office for the publication of this series of Letters 
written by a Temporary Officer of the New Army. 
No alteration has been made in the Letters to 
prepare them for the Press beyond the deleting or 
changing, for obvious reasons, of certain names 
used. 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

The writer has introduced this "Temporary 
Gentleman" to many good fellows in England, 
France, and Flanders, and is very anxious to intro- 
duce him on a really friendly footing to all his 
brothers-in-arms across the Atlantic; from New 
York to San Francisco, and from Quebec to Van- 
couver Island, also. But how best to do it? It 
really is no very easy matter, this, to present one 
simple, very human unit of the New Armies, to a 
hundred millions of people. 

"Dear America: Herewith please find one 
slightly damaged but wholly decent 'Temporary 
Gentleman' who you will find repays considera- 
tion." 

I think that is strictly true, and though, in a 
way, it covers the ground, it does not, somehow, 
seem wholly adequate; and I have an uncomfort- 
able feeling that the critics might find in it ground 
for severe comments. But it is just what I mean ; 
and I would be well content that all the kindly 



vi By Way of Introduction 

men and women of America should just find out 
about this " Temporary Gentleman" for them- 
selves, and form their own opinion, rather than 
that I should set down things about him in ad- 
vance. If these letters of his do not commend 
him to America's heart and judgment, I am 
very sure no words of mine would stand any chance 
of doing so. Yes, for my part, warmly anxious 
as I am for America to know him, and to feel 
towards him as folk do in France and Flanders 
and Britain, I am perfectly prepared to let him 
stand or fall upon his own letters, which certainly 
discover the man to you, whatever you may 
think of him. 

Withal, in case it may interest any among the 
millions of American families from which some 
member has gone out to train and to fight, to 
save the Allied democracies of the world from 
being over-ridden by the murderous aggression 
of its remaining autocracies, I take pleasure in 
testifying here to the fact that among the officers 
now serving in Britain's New Armies (as among 
those who, whilst serving, have passed to their 
long rest) are very many thousands who are just 
for all the world like the writer of these letters. 
I have watched and spoken with whole cadet- 



By Way of Introduction 



vu 



training battalions of them, seen them march past 
in column of fours, chins well up, arms aswing, 
eyes front, and hearts beating high with glad 
determination and pride— just because their 
chance has nearly come for doing precisely what 
the writer of these letters did: for treading the 
exact track he blazed, away back there in 1915; 
for the right to offer the same sort of effort he 
made, for God and King and Country; to guard 
the Right, and avenge the Wrong, and to shield 
Christendom and its liberties from a menace more 
deadly than any that the world's admitted bar- 
barians and heathens ever offered. 

I know there are very many thousands of them 
who are just like this particular "Temporary 
Gentleman," — even as there must be many 
thousands of his like in America, — because there 
have been so many among those with whom I have 
lived and worked and fought, in the trenches. 
And it does seem to me, after study of the letters, 
that this statement forms something of a tribute 
to the spirit, the efficiency, and the devotion to 
their duty, of the whole tribe of the Temporary 
Officers. 

Their lost sense of humour (withered out of 
existence, I take it, by the poison gas of Prussian 



viii By Way of Introduction 

Kultur) would seem to have made the German 
nation literally incapable of forming an approxi- 
mately correct estimate of the capacities of any 
people outside the confines of their own machine- 
made, despotically ordered State, in which public 
sentiment and opinion is manufactured from 
"sealed pattern" recipes kept under lock and key 
in Potsdam and the Wilhelmstrasse. Their blun- 
ders in psychology since July, 19 14, would have 
formed an unparalleled comedy of errors, if they 
had not, instead, produced a tragedy unequalled 
in history. With regard to America alone, the 
record of their mistakes and misreadings would 
fill a stout volume. In the earlier days of the 
War, I read many German statements which 
purported (very solemnly) to prove: 

(a) That in the beginning of the War they 
killed off all the British officers. 

(b) That the British officer material had long 
since been exhausted. 

(c) That, since it was impossible for the 
British to produce more officers, they could not 
by any effort place a really big Army in the field. 

And the queer thing is that German machine- 
made illusions are of cast-iron. They "stay 
put"; permanently. During 191 7 I read again 



By Way of Introduction ix 

precisely the same fatuous German statement 
regarding America and her inability to produce 
an army, that one read in 191 4 and 191 5 about 
Britain. The British New Armies (which Ger- 
many affirmed could never seriously count) have 
succeeded in capturing nearly three times as many 
prisoners as they have lost, and more than four 
times as many guns. From 1916 onward they 
steadily hammered back the greatest concentra- 
tions of German military might that Hindenburg 
could put up, and did not lose in the whole period 
as much ground as they have won in a single day 
from the Kaiser's legions. Yet still, in 1917, the 
same ostrich-like German scribes, who vowed that 
Britain could not put an army in the field because 
they could never officer it, were repeating pre- 
cisely the same foolish talk about America and her 
New Armies. 

Perhaps there is only one argument which 
Germany is now really able to appreciate. That 
argument has been pointedly, and very effectively, 
presented for some time past by the writer of these 
letters, and all his comrades. From this stage 
onward, it will further be pressed home upon the 
German by the armies of America, whose po- 
tentialities he has laboriously professed to ridicule. 



x By Way of Introduction 

It is the argument of high explosive and cold 
steel; the only argument capable of bringing ulti- 
mate conviction' to the Wilhelmstrasse that the 
English-speaking peoples, though they may know 
nothing of the goose-step, yet are not wont to cry 
"Kamerad, " or to offer surrender to any other 
people on earth. 

I know very well that the writer of these letters 
had no thought as he wrote— back there in 191 6 — 
of any kind of argument or reply to Potsdamed 
fantasies. But yet I would submit that, all 
unwittingly, he has furnished in these letters (on 
America's behalf, as well as Britain's) what should 
prove for unprejudiced readers outside Germany 
a singularly telling answer to the Boche's foolish 
boasts of the Anglo-Saxon inability to produce 
officers. As a correspondent in the Press recently 
wrote: "Why, for generations past the English- 
speaking peoples have been officering the world and 
all its waters — especially its waters!" And so 
they have, as all the world outside Germany 
knows, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego; 
from the Atlantic round through the Philippines to 
the golden gate and back. 

It is a high sense of honour, horse sense, and 
sportsmanship, in our Anglo-Saxon sense, that lie 



By Way of Introduction xi 

at the root of successful leadership. And one of 
Prussia's craziest illusions was that with us, 
these qualities were the sole monopoly of the men 
who kept polo ponies and automobiles! 

Only the guns of the Allies and the steel of their 
dauntless infantrymen can enlighten a people so 
hopelessly deluded as the Germans of to-day. 
But for the rest of the world I believe there is 
much in this little collection of the frank, unstudied 
writings of an average New Army officer, who, 
prior to the War, was a clerk in a suburban office, 
to show that sportsmanship and leadership are 
qualities characteristic of every single division 
of the Anglo-Saxon social systems; and that, 
perhaps more readily than any other race, we can 
produce from every class and every country in the 
English-speaking half of the world, men who make 
the finest possible kind of active service officers; 
men who, though their commissions may be 
" Temporary" and their names innocent of a 
"von, " or any other prefix, are not only fine 
officers, but, permanently, and by nature, gentle- 
men and sportsmen. 

Withal, it may be that I should be falling short 
of complete fulfilment of a duty which I am glad 
and proud to discharge, if I omitted to furnish 



xii By Way of Introduction 

any further information regarding the personality 
of the writer of these letters. And so, if the reader 
will excuse yet another page or two of wire entangle- 
ment between himself and the actual trenches — 
the letters, I mean — I will try to explain. 

A. J. Dawson, 

Captain. 

London, 1918. 



THE GENESIS OF THE "TEMPORARY 
GENTLEMAN" 

In the case of the Service Battalion officer of 
Britain's New Army who, with humorous modesty, 
signs himself "Your 'Temporary Gentleman,'' 
what is there behind that enigmatic signature that 
his letters do not tell us? The first of these 
homely epistles shows their writer arriving with 
his Battalion in France; and the visit is evidently 
his first to that fair land, since he writes: "I 
wonder if I should ever have seen it had there 
been no war!" That exclamation tells a good 
deal. 

But of the man and his antecedents prior to that 
moment of landing with his unit in France, the 
letters tell us nothing; and if it be true that the 
war has meant being "born again" for very many 
Englishmen, that frequently quoted statement at 
all events points to the enjoyment of some definite 
status before the war. 

Inquiry in this particular case speedily brings 



xiv "Temporary Gentleman " Genesis 

home to one the fact that one is investigating the 
antecedents of a well-recognised New Army type, a 
thoroughly representative type, as well as those of 
an individual. In his antecedents, as in the revolu- 
tionary development which the war has brought 
to him, this "Temporary Gentleman" is clearly 
one among very many thousands who have, so to 
say, passed through the same crucibles, been sub- 
mitted to the same standard tests, and emerged 
in the trenches of France and Flanders, in Gallipoli 
and in Mesopotamia, in Africa, and in other places 
in which the common enemy has endeavoured 
to uphold his proposed substitution of Kultur for 
civilisation, as we understand it. 

In the year 1896 there died, in a south-western 
suburb of London, a builder and contractor in a 
small, suburban way of business. An industrious, 
striving, kindly, and honourable man, he had had a 
number of different irons in the fire, as the saying 
goes, and some of them, it may be, would have pro- 
vided a good reward for his industry if he had 
lived. As the event proved, however, the winding- 
up of his affairs produced for his widow a sum 
representing no more than maintenance upon a 
very modest scale of a period of perhaps three 
years. The widow was not alone in the world. 



44 Temporary Gentleman " Genesis xv 

She had a little daughter, aged five, and a sturdy 
son, aged eight years. Nineteen years later that 
boy, into whose youth and early training not 
even the mention of anything military ever crept, 
was writing letters home from fire trenches in 
France, and signing them ''Your 'Temporary 
Gentleman.'" 

For seven years after his father's death the boy 
attended a day school in Brixton. The tuition he 
there received was probably inferior in many ways 
to that which would have fallen to his lot in one of 
the big establishments presided over by the County 
Council. But his mother's severely straitened 
circumstances had rather strengthened than low- 
ered her natural pride ; and she preferred to enlarge 
the sphere of her necessary sacrifices, and by the 
practice of the extremest thrift and industry to 
provide for the teaching of her two children at 
private schools. The life of the fatherless little 
family was necessarily a narrow one; its horizon 
was severely restricted, but its respectability was 
unimpeachable; and within the close-set walls of 
the little Brixton home there never was seen any 
trace of baseness, of coarseness, or of what is 
called vulgarity. The boy grew up in an at- 
mosphere of reticence and modesty, in which the 



xvi " Temporary Gentleman ** Genesis 

dominant factors were thrift, duty, conscientious- 
ness, and deep-rooted family affection. 

The first epoch of his fatherless life closed when 
our "Temporary Gentleman" left school, at the 
age of fifteen, and mounted a stool in the office of a 
local auctioneer and estate agent, who, in the 
previous decade, had had satisfactory business 
dealings with the youth's father. This notable 
event introduced some change into the quiet little 
mother-ruled menage; for, in a sense, it had to be 
recognised that, with the bringing home of his 
first week's pay, the boy threatened to become a 
man. The patient mother was at once proud and 
a little disconcerted. But, upon the whole, pride 
ruled. The boy's mannishness, brought up as he 
had been, did not take on any very disconcerting 
shapes, though the first cigarette he produced in 
the house, not very long after the conclusion of the 
South African War, did prove something of a 
disturbing element just at first. 

The South African War affected this little house- 
hold, perhaps, as much as it would have been 
affected by a disastrous famine in China. It 
came before the period at which the son of the 
house started bringing home an evening newspaper, 
and while the only periodicals to enter the home 



•• Temporary Gentleman " Genesis xvii 

were still The Boy's Own Paper and a weekly 
journal concerned with dressmaking and patterns. 
As a topic of conversation it was not mentioned 
half a dozen times in that household from first to 
last. 

The next really great event in the life of the 
auctioneer's clerk was his purchase of a bicycle, 
which, whilst catastrophic in its effect upon his 
Post Office Savings Bank account, was in other 
respects a source of great happiness to him. And 
if it meant something of a wrench to his mother, as 
a thing calculated to remove her boy a little farther 
beyond the narrow confines of the sphere of her 
exclusive domination, she never allowed a hint of 
this to appear. Her son's admirable physique 
had long been a source of considerable pride to 
her; and she had wisely encouraged his assiduity 
in the Polytechnic gymnasium of which he was a 
valued supporter. 

For the youth himself, his bicycle gave him the 
key of a new world, whilst robbing the cricket and 
football clubs to which he belonged of a distinctly 
useful member. He became an amateur of rural 
topography, learned in all the highways and by- 
ways of the southern Home Counties. His radius 
may not have exceeded fifty miles, but yet his 



xviii "Temporary Gentleman ••• Genesis 

bicycle interpreted England to him in a new light, 
as something infinitely greater and more beautiful 
than Brixton. 

Quietly, evenly, the years slid by. The boy be- 
came a youth and the youth a man; and, in a 
modest way, the man prospered, becoming the 
most important person, next to its proprietor, 
in the estate agent's business. The mother's life 
became easier, and the sister (who had become a 
school-teacher) owed many little comforts and 
pleasures to the consistent kindliness of one who 
now was admittedly the head of the little house- 
hold and its chief provider. He never gave a 
thought to the State or felt the smallest kind of 
interest in politics; yet his life was in no way 
self-centred or selfish, but, on the contrary, one in 
which the chief motive was the service of those 
nearest and dearest to him. Whilst rarely look- 
ing inward, his outward vision was bounded by 
the horizon of his well-ordered little home, of the 
Home Counties he had learned to love, and of the 
south-coast seaside village in which the family 
spent a happy fortnight every summer. 

They were in that little seaside village when the 
Huns decreed war and desolation for Europe in 
August, 19 14, and the three were a good deal upset 



•'Temporary Gentleman" Genesis xix 

about the whole business, for it interfered with the 
railway service, and broke in very unpleasantly 
upon the holiday atmosphere, which, coming as it 
did for but one fortnight in each year, was exceed- 
ingly precious to the little family. However, 
with the Englishman's instinct for clinging to the 
established order, with all the national hatred of 
disturbance, they clung as far as possible to the 
measured pleasantness of their holiday routine, 
and, after a week, returned to the workaday 
round of life in Brixton. 

Then began a time of peculiar stress and anxiety 
for the little household, the dominating factor in 
which was the growing strangeness, as it seemed to 
them, of its actual head and ruler; of the man in 
the house. At first he talked a great deal of the 
war, the overpowering news of the day, and he 
passed many scathing criticisms upon the conduct 
of the authorities in their handling of the first 
stages of the monstrous work of preparation. He 
had much to say of their blunders and oversights ; 
and somewhat, too, of what he called their crim- 
inal unpreparedness. He stopped talking rather 
abruptly at breakfast one morning ; and one of the 
headlines which subsequently caught the eyes of 
his sister, in the newspaper her brother had 



xx ** Temporary Gentleman" Genesis 

propped against the coffee-pot, put this inquiry, 
in bold black type : 



"WHOSE FAULT IS IT, MR. CITIZEN, THAT THE 
COUNTRY IS UTTERLY UNPREPARED FOR WAR? " 



Those nightmarish early days of the great war 
slowly succeeded one another, and the mother and 
daughter grew perturbed over the change they saw 
creeping over their man. He talked hardly at all 
now. All the old cheery, kindly good humour 
which had provided half the sunshine of their lives 
seemed to be disappearing and giving place to a 
queer, nervous, morose sort of depression. It was 
as if their man lived a double life. Clearly he 
was much affected, even absorbed, by some mental 
process which he never so much as mentioned to 
them. Morning and evening they saw him, and 
yet it was as though he was not there, as though 
he lived and had his being in some other world, 
aloof from the old cosy, familiar, shared world in 
which they had always been together. The house- 
wifely eye of his mother noted with something like 
alarm that his bedroom candlestick required a 
fresh candle every day. One had been wont to 
serve him for a fortnight. Always, she thought 



"Temporary Gentleman " Genesis xxi 

he would unburden himself when he kissed her 
good-night. But he said never a word; and the 
nerve strain in the little household, which had 
been so quietly happy and bright, became almost 
unendurable. 

Then the end came, with the beginning of the 
third week in September. The evening was extra- 
ordinarily peaceful and fine. The sister and a girl 
friend were at the little cottage piano. The visitor 
had a rather rich contralto voice, and sang with 
considerable feeling. In the middle of her third 
song the master of the house rose abruptly and 
walked out of the room, closing the door sharply 
behind him. The song was one of those called a 
"recruiting song." Late that night, when the 
visitor had departed, the brother apologised to his 
mother and sister for leaving them so abruptly, 
and spoke of a sudden headache. And the next 
evening he brought home the devastating news 
that he had enlisted, and would be leaving them 
next day for a military depot. 

The news was received in dead silence. In some 
mysterious way neither of the women had contem- 
plated this as possible. For others, yes. For 
their man — the thing was too wildly, remotely 
strange to be possible. There was his business; 



xxii ••Temporary Gentleman" Genesis 

and, besides — It was merely impossible. And 
now he was an enlisted soldier, he told them. 
But, though they hardly suspected it, not being 
given to the practice of introspection, their man 
was not the only member of the little household 
in whom a fundamental and revolutionary change 
had been wrought by the world-shaking news of 
the past six weeks. In the end the women kissed 
their man, and the central fact of his astounding 
intelligence was not discussed at all. They pro- 
ceeded direct to practical, material arrangements. 
But when the time came for her good-night kiss, 
the mother said, very quietly, "God bless you, 
dear!"; and the sister smiled and showed a new 
pride through the wet gleam of her eyes. 

And then the auctioneer's clerk disappeared 
from the peaceful purlieus of Brixton and went out 
alone into an entirely new world, the like of which 
had never presented itself to his fancy, even in 
dreams. He became one of fifteen men whose 
home was a bell tent designed to give easy shelter 
to perhaps half that number. He began to spend 
his days in a routine of drill which, even to him 
with his gymnasium training, seemed most singu- 
larly tiresome and meaningless — at first. 

At the end of four weeks he returned home for a 



"Temporary Gentleman" Genesis xxiii 

Saturday night and Sunday in the Brixton house; 
and he wore one stripe on the sleeve of his service 
jacket. To his intelligence there now was nothing 
in the whole intricate round of section, platoon, and 
company drill which was meaningless, however 
wearing it might sometimes seem. There was a 
tan on his cheeks, a clear brightness in his eyes, 
an alert swing in his carriage, and a surprisingly 
crisp ring in his voice which at once bewildered 
and delighted his womenfolk. He seemed not so 
much a new man as the man whom they had 
always loved and respected, in some subtle way 
magnified, developed, tuned up, brought to concert 
pitch. 

In November he was advised by his Company 
Commander to apply for a Commission. The 
officer badly wanted him for a Sergeant, but this 
officer had long since learned to place duty first 
and inclination a long way behind; and it was 
apparent to him that in this tall, alert Lance- 
Corporal of his, as in so many hundreds of other 
men in the ranks, there was the making of a good 
officer. 

Shortly before Christmas, 19 14, he was gazetted 
a Second Lieutenant, and on New Year's Day he 
found himself walking across a parade ground to 



xxiv "Temporary Gentleman" Genesis 

take his place in front of the platoon he subse- 
quently led in France, after long months of arduous 
training in several different English camps. 

Three-quarters of a year passed between the 
day of this "Temporary Gentleman's" enlistment 
and his writing of the first of the letters now pub- 
lished over his pseudonym; and it may well be 
that all the previous years of his life put together 
produced no greater modification and development 
in the man than came to him in those nine months 
of training for the New Army. The training had 
its bookish side, for he was very thorough ; but it 
was in the open air from dawn till dark, and 
ninety per cent, of it came to him in the process 
of training others. 

The keynotes of the training were noblesse oblige, 
sportsmanship and responsibility, that form of 
"playing the game" which is at the root of the 
discipline of the British Army. While he taught 
the men of his platoon they taught him, in every 
hour of the day and many hours of the night. 
They learned to call him "A pretty good sort," 
which is very high praise indeed. And he learned 
to be as jealous of his men as any mother can be of 
her children. He learned to know them, in fair 
weather and in foul, for the splendid fellows they 



"Temporary Gentleman ** Genesis xxv 

are; and in the intensely proud depths of his own 
inner consciousness to regard them as the finest 
platoon in the New Army. 

And then came the longed-for day of the depar- 
ture for France, for the land he was to learn to 
love, despite all the horrors of its long fighting 
line, just as he learned most affectionately to ad- 
mire the men and reverence the women of brave, 
beautiful France. In the letters that he wrote 
from France he had, of course, no faintest thought 
of the ultimate test of publication. That is one 
reason why his name is not now attached to docu- 
ments so intimate, even apart from the sufficiently 
obvious military reasons. 

A.J.D. 



CONTENTS 
The First Letter . . . . 


Page 
I 


The First March . 


9 


The Tale of a Tub . 


18 


The Trenches at Last 


. 28 


A Dissertation on Mud 


. 37 


Taking over on a Quiet Night . 


. 46 


"What It's Like" .... 


. 56 


The Dug-out ..... 


■ 67 


A Bombing Show .... 


• 79 


Over the Parapet . 


■ 89 


The Night Patrol . 


99 


In Billets ...... 


in 


Bombardment 


121 


The Day's Work . . . . 


. 132 


Tommy Dodd and Trench Routine 


. 142 


Stalking Snipers .... 


. 152 


An Artful Stunt .... 


. 160 



xxviii Contents 








Page 


The Spirit of the Men . . . .169 


An Unhealthy Bit of Line 






. 179 


They Say . 






188 


The New Front Line 






■ 197 


A Great Night's Work 






210 


The Coming Push 






220 


Front Line to Hospital 






. 229 


The Push and After 






239 


Blighty 






250 



A "Temporary Gentleman " 
in France 



A "Temporary Gentleman 55 
in France 



THE FIRST LETTER 

Here we are at last, "Somewhere in France," 
and I suppose this will be the first letter you have 
ever had from your " Temporary Gentleman" 
which hasn't a stamp on it. It is rather nice to 
be able to post without stamps, and I hope the 
Censor will find nothing to object to in what I 
write. It's hard to know where to begin. 

Here we are "at last," I say — we were nearly 
a year training at home, you know — and I shall 
not easily forget our coming. It really was a 
wonderful journey from Salisbury Plain, with 
never a hitch of any sort or kind, or so much as a 
buttonstick gone astray. Someone with a pretty 
good head -piece must arrange these things. At 
ten minutes to three this morning we were on the 

i 



2 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

parade ground at over a thousand strong. 

At twenty minutes to eleven we marched down 
the wharf here at — - — , well, somewhere in France ; 
and soon after twelve the cook-house bugle went 
in this camp, high up on a hill outside the town, 
and we had our first meal in France — less than 
eight hours from our huts on the Plain ; not quite 
the Front yet, but La Belle France, all the same. 
I wonder if I should ever have seen it had there 
been no war? 

Our transport, horses, mules, and limbers had 
gone on ahead by another route. But, you know, 
the carrying of over a thousand men is no small 
matter, when you accomplish it silently, without 
delay, and with all the compact precision of a bat- 
talion parade, as this move of ours was managed. 
Three minutes after our train drew up at the 
harbour station, over there in England, the four 
companies, led by Headquarters Staff, and the 
band (with out regimental hound pacing in front) 
were marching down the wharf in column of route, 
with a good swing. There were four gangways, 
and we filed on board the steamer as if it had 
been the barrack square. Then off packs and into 
lifebelts every man; and in ten minutes the Bat- 
talion was eating its haversack breakfast ration, 



The First Letter 3 

and the steamer was nosing out to the open sea, 
heading for France, the Front, and Glory. 

The trip across was a stirring experience in its 
way too. The wide sea, after all, is just as open 
to the Boche as to us, and he is pretty well off for 
killing craft and mines. Yet, although through 
these long months we have been carrying troops 
to and fro every day, not once has he been able 
to check us in the Channel. The way the Navy's 
done its job is — it's just a miracle of British disci- 
pline and efficiency. All across the yellow foam- 
flecked sea our path was marked out for us like 
a racecourse, and outside the track we could see 
the busy little mine-sweepers hustling to and fro 
at their police work, guarding the highway for 
the British Army. Not far from us, grim and 
low, like a greyhound extended, a destroyer slid 
along: our escort. 

The thing thrilled you, like a scene in a play; 
the quiet Masters of the Sea guarding us on our 
way to fight the blustering, boastful, would-be 
stealers of the earth. And from first to last I 
never heard a single order shouted. There was 
not a single hint of flurry. 

It is about seven hours now since we landed, 
and I feel as though we had been weeks away 



4 A " Temporary Gentleman ** 

already — I suppose because there is so much to 
see. And yet it doesn't seem very foreign, really; 
and if only I could remember some of the French 
we were supposed to learn at school, so as to be 
able to understand what the people in the street 
are talking about, it would be just like a fresh 
bit of England. Although, just a few hours away, 
with no sea between us, there's the Hun, with 
his poison gas and his Black Marias and all the 
rest of the German outfit. Well, we've brought 
a good chunk of England here since the war be- 
gan; solid acres of bully beef and barbed wire, 
condensed milk and galvanised iron, Maconochie 
rations, small-arm ammunition, biscuits, hand 
grenades, jam, picks and shovels, cheese, rifles, 
butter, boots, and pretty well everything else 
you can think of; all neatly stacked in miles of 
sheds, and ready for the different units on our 
Front. 

I think the French are glad to see us. They 
have a kind of a welcoming way with them, in 
the streets and everywhere, that makes you feel 
as though, if you're not actually at home, you 
are on a visit to your nearest relations. A jolly, 
cheery, kindly good-natured lot they are, in spite 
of all the fighting in their own country and all 



The First Letter 5 

the savage destruction the Huns have brought. 
The people in the town are quite keen on our 
drums and bugles; marching past them is like a 
review. It makes you "throw a chest" no matter 
what your pack weighs; and we are all carry- 
ing truck enough to stock a canteen with. The 
kiddies run along and catch you by the hand. The 
girls — there are some wonderfully pretty girls 
here, who have a kind of a way with them, a sort 
of style that is French, I suppose; it's pretty 
taking, anyhow — they wave their handkerchiefs 
and smile. "Bon chance ! ' ' they tell you. And you 
feel they really mean "Good luck!" I like these 
people, and they seem to like us pretty well. As 
for men, you don't see many of them about. 
They are in the righting line, except the quite 
old ones. And the way the women carry on their 
work is something fine. All with such a jolly 
swing and a laugh; something brave and taking 
and fine about them all. 

If this writing seems a bit ragged you must 
excuse it. The point of my indelible pencil seems 
to wear down uncommonly fast; I suppose be- 
cause of the rough biscuit box that is my table. 
We are in a tent, with a rather muddy boarded 
floor, and though the wind blows mighty cold 



6 A "Temporary Gentleman " 

and keen outside, we are warm as toast in here. 
I fancy we shall be here till to-morrow night. 
Probably do a route march round the town and 
show ourselves off to-morrow. The CO. rather 
fancies himself in the matter of our band and the 
Battalion's form in marching. We're not bad, 
you know; and "A" Company, of course, is 
pretty nearly the last word. "Won't be much 
sleep for the Kaiser after 'A' Company gets to 
the Front," says "the Peacemaker." We call our 
noble company commander "the Peacemaker," 
or sometimes "Ramsay Angell," as I think I 
must have told you before, because he's so deadly 
keen on knuckle-duster daggers and things of 
that sort. "Three inches over the right kidney, 
and when you hear his quiet cough you can pass 
on to the next Boche," says "the Peacemaker," 
when he is showing off a nW trench dagger. 
Sort of, "And the next article, please," manner 
he has, you know; and we all like him for it. It's 
his spirit that's made "A" Company what it is. 
I don't mean that we call him "the Peacemaker" 
to his face, you know. 

We can't be altogether war-worn veterans or 
old campaigners yet, I suppose, though it does 
seem much more than seven hours since we landed. 



The First Letter 7 

But everyone agrees there's something about us 
that we did not have last year — I mean yester- 
day. From the Colonel down to the last man in 
from the depot we've all got it; and though I 
don't know what it is, it makes a lot of difference. 
I think it is partly that there isn't any more "Out 
there" with us now. It's "Out here." And 
everything that came before to-day is "Over in 
England," you know; ever so far away. I don't 
know why a man should feel more free here than 
in England. But there it is. The real thing, 
the thing we've all been longing for, the thing 
we joined for, seems very close at hand now, and, 
naturally, you know, everyone wants to do his 
bit. It's funny to hear our fellows talking, as 
though the Huns were round the corner. If 
there's anything a man doesn't like — a sore heel, 
or a split canteen of stew, or a button torn off — 
"We'll smarten the Boche for that," they say, or, 
' ' Righto ! That's another one in for the Kaiser ! " 
You would have thought we should have had 
time during the past six months or so to have 
put together most of the little things a campaigner 
wants, wouldn't you? especially seeing that a 
man has to carry all his belongings about with 
him and yet I would make a sporting bet that 



8 A "Temporary Gentleman •* 

there are not half a dozen men in the Battalion 
who have bought nothing to carry with them to- 
day. There is a Y. M. C. A. hut and a good can- 
teen in this camp, and there has been a great 
business done in electric torches, tooth-powder, 
chocolate, knives, pipe-lighters, and all manner 
of notions. We are all very glad to be here, very 
glad; and nine out of ten will dream to-night of 
trenches in France and the Push we all mean to 
win V.C.'s in. But that's not to say we shall 
forget England and the — the little things we care 
about at home. Now I'm going to turn in for 
my first sleep in France. So give what you have 
to spare of my love to all whom it may concern, 
and accept the rest yourself from your 

" Temporary Gentleman. 11 



THE FIRST MARCH 

We reached this long, straggling village in pale 
starlight a little after six this morning; and with 
it the welcome end of the first stage of our jour- 
ney from the port of disembarking to our section 
of the French Front. 

In all the months of our training in England I 
never remember to have seen "A" Company any- 
thing like so tired ; and we had some pretty gruel- 
ling times, too, during those four-day divisional 
stunts and in the chalk trenches on the Plain; 
and again in the night ops. on the heather of those 
North Yorkshire moors. But "A" Company 
was never so tired as when we found our billets 
here this morning. Yet we were in better form 
than any other company in the Battalion; and 
I'm quite sure no other Battalion in the Brigade 
could march against our fellows. 

The whole thing is a question of what one has 
to carry. Just now, of course, we are carrying 
every blessed thing we possess, including great- 

9 



io A "Temporary Gentleman •• 

coats and blankets, not to mention stocks of 
'baccy, torches, maps, stationery, biscuits, and 
goodness knows what besides; far fuller kits, no 
doubt, than tried campaigners ever have. (I 
found little M , of No. 3 Platoon, surrep- 
titiously stuffing through a hedge a case of patent 
medicines, including cough-mixture and Mother 
Somebody's Syrup !) If you ever visit France you 
probably won't travel on your own ten toes; but 
if you should, be advised by me and cut your kit 
down to the barest minimum; and when you've 
done that, throw away a good half of what's left. 
Boots and socks. Some people will tell you 
that stocks and shares and international politics 
are matters of importance. I used to think the 
pattern of my neckties made a difference to our 
auctions. I know now that the really big things, 
the things that are really important, are socks 
and boots, and hot coffee and sleep, and bread — 
"Pang — Compree?" says Tommy to the French 
women, with a finger at his mouth — and then 
socks and boots again. You thought we paid a 
good deal in the shop for those swanky trench 

boots, W and myself. That was nothing to* 

what we've paid since for wearing 'em. Excellent 
trench boots, I dare say; but one has to walk 



The First March n 

across a good bit of France before getting to the 
trenches, you know. Those boots are much too 
heavy to carry and no good for marching. They 
look jolly and workmanlike, you know, but they 
eat up too much of one's heels. Tell all the officers 
you know to come out in ordinary marching boots, 
good ones, but ordinary ankle boots. Plenty 
time to get trench boots when they get to the 
trenches. Good old Q.M. Dept. will see to that. 
Our respected O.C. Company had no horse, you 
know (we haven't yet made connection with our 
transport), and his heels to-day look like some- 
thing in the steak line about half -grilled. 

We left camp at the port I mustn't name about 
eight o'clock last night, and marched down the 
hill to the station in sort of thoughtful good spirits, 
the packs settling down into their grooves. To 
save adding its immensity to my pack, I wore my 
imposing trench coat, with its sheep-skin lining; 
waist measurement over all, say a hundred and 
twenty-five. Two of us had some difficulty about 
ramming "the Peacemaker," through his carriage 
door into the train, he also being splendid in a 
multi-lined trench coat. Then we mostly mopped 
up perspiration and went to sleep. 

Between twelve and one o'clock in the morning 



12 A ••Temporary Gentleman" 

we left the train (not without emotion; it was a 
friendly, comfortable train), and started to march 
across France. The authorities, in their godlike 
way, omitted to give us any information as to 
how far we were to march. But the weather was 
fine, and "A" Company moved off with a good 
swing, to the tune of their beloved "Keep the 
Camp Fires Burning." The biggest of packs 
seems a trifle, you know, immediately after four 
hours' rest in a train. But after the first hour 
it's astonishing how its importance in your scheme 
of things grows upon you; and at the end of the 
third or fourth hour you are very glad to stuff 
anything like bottles of Mother Somebody's 
Syrup through a gap in the nearest hedge. 

It was at about that stage that word reached us 
of one or two men falling out from the rear com- 
panies. At this "the Peacemaker" began jogging 
up and down the left of our Company — we march 
on the right of .the road in France — and, for all his 
sore heels and tremendous coat, showing the 
skittishness of a two-year-old. And he's even 
good years older than any of the rest of us, or 
than anyone else in the Company. I chipped my 
fellows into starting up another song, and my 
Platoon Sergeant cheerfully passed the word 



The First March 13 

round that if anybody in No. 1 dared to fall out 
he'd disembowel him with a tin-opener. 

As an actual fact not a single "A" Company 
man did fall out, though in the last lap I was a bit 
nervy about old Tommy Dodd in 3 Section, whose 
rifle I carried, and one or two others. At the end 
"the Peacemaker" was carrying the rifles of two 
men, and everybody was thankful for walls to 
lean against when we stood easy in this village. 
My chaps were splendid. 

"Stick: it, Tommy Dodd!" I said to the old boy 
once, near the end. His good old face was all 
twisted with the pain of his feet and the mass of 
extra kit which no doubt his wife had made him 
carry. 

"Stick it!" says he, with his twisted grin. 
"Why, I'm just beginning to enjoy it, sir. Just 
getting into me stride, I am. I wouldn't 've 
missed this for all the beer in England, sir. But 
you wait till we get alongside them blighted 
Boches, sir, an' see if I don't smarten some of 
'em for this. I'll give 'em sore 'eels!" 

It was only by lying to the extent of at least 
ten years that the old thing was able to enlist, and 
you couldn't get him to "go sick" if you drove 
him with a whip. The only way old Tommy 



14 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

Dodd's spirit could be broken would be if you 
sent him to the depot and refused him his chance 
of " smartening them blighted Bodies." 

Everyone in the village was asleep when we got 
there, but on the door we found chalked up (as it 
might be "Lot So-and-so" at a sale) "i Officer, 
25 men, 'A' Coy.," and so on. We officers shed 
our packs and coats in the road— the joy of that 
shedding! — and went round with our platoons 
picking out their quarters, and shepherding them 
in before they could fall asleep. We knocked up 
the inhabitants, who came clattering out in clogs, 
with candle-ends in big lanterns. Most remark- 
ably cheery and good-natured they all seemed, for 
that time of day; mostly women, you know, you 
don't find many home-staying men in France to- 
day. The most of the men's billets are barns and 
granaries, and there is a good supply of straw. I 
can tell you there was no need to sound any 
"Lights Out" or "Last Post." No. 1 Platoon 
just got down into their straw like one man, and 
no buck at all about it. 

Then when we had seen them all fixed up, we 
foraged round for our own billets. Mine proved 
a little brick-floored apartment, in which you might 
just swing a very small cat if you felt like that 



The First March 15 

kind of jugglery, opening out of the main room, 
or bar, of an estaminet — the French village ver- 
sion of our inn, you know. Here, when they 
had had their sleep, the men began to flock this 
afternoon for refreshment. The drinking is quite 
innocent, mostly cafe au lait, and occasionally 
cider. The sale of spirits is (very wisely) entire- 
ly prohibited. It's most amusing to hear our 
chaps "slinging the bat." They are still at the 
stage of thinking that if they shout loudly enough 
they must be understood, and it is rather as a sort 
of good-humoured concession to the eccentricities 
of our French hosts, than with any idea of tackling 
another language, that they throw in their "Bon 
jor's" and the like. 

"Got any pang, Mum?" they ask cheerfully. 
Another repeats it, in a regular open-air auction 
shout, with a grin and an interrogative ' ' Compree ?" 
at the end of each remark. Some, still at the top 
of their voices, are even bold enough to try 
instructing the French. "Franeaisee, 'pang' — 
see? In Engletairy, 'bread' — see? Compree? 
b-r-e-a-d, bread." And the kindly French wo- 
men, with their smiling lips and anxious, war-worn 
eyes, they nod and acquiesce, and bustle in and 
out with yard-long loaves and bowls of coffee of 



16 A '* Temporary Gentleman" 

precisely the same size as the diminutive wash- 
hand basin in my room. I tell you one's heart 
warms to these French women, in their workman- 
like short frocks (nearly all black), thick, home- 
knitted stockings, and wooden clogs. How they 
keep the heels of their stockings so dry and clean, 
I can't think. The subject, you notice, is one of 
peculiar interest to all of us just now — sock heels, 
I mean. 

There have been a good many jobs for officers 
all day, so far, and only an hour or so for rest. 
But we have arranged for a sumptuous repast 
— roast duck and sausages and treacle pudding — 
at six o'clock, and the CO. and Providence per- 
mitting, we shall all turn in before eight. We 
don't expect to move on from here till early the 
day after to-morrow, and shall have our transport 
with us by then. I gather we shall march all 
the way from here to the trenches; and really, 
you know, it's, an excellent education for all of 
us in the conditions of the country. People at 
home don't realise what a big thing the domestic 
side of soldiering is. Our CO. knew, of course, 
because he is an old campaigner. That's why, 
back there in England, he harried his officers as 
he did. We have to know all there is to know 



The First March 17 

about the feet, boots, socks, food, cleanliness, and 
health of each one of our men, and it has been 
made part of our religion that an officer must 
never, never, never eat, sleep, or rest until he has 
personally seen to it that each man in his command 
is provided for in these respects. He has made it 
second nature to us, and since we reached France 
one has learned the wisdom of his teaching. I 
must clear out now — a pow-wow at Battalion 
Orderly Room: the village Ecole des Filles. The 
weather ' has completely changed. There's a 
thin, crisp coating of snow over everything, and 
it's clear and dry and cold. We're all rather tired, 
but fit as fleas, and awfully thankful to be getting 
so near the firing line. So make your mind quite 
easy about your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 



THE TALE OF A TUB 

If inclined to revile me for apparent neglect of 
you these last few days, be charitable and revile 
lightly. 

It's astonishing how full one's days are. And 
then when late evening arrives and arrangements 
for next morning are complete, and one's been the 
round of one's platoon billets and seen all in order 
for the night — then, instead of being free to write 
one's own letters, one must needs wade through 
scores written by the men of one's platoon, who 
— lucky beggars! — have three times the leisure 
we can ever get. Their letters must all be cen- 
sored and initialed, you see. Rightly enough, I 
suppose, the military principle seems to be never 
to allow the private soldier to be burdened by any 
responsibility which an officer can possibly take. 
The giving away of military information in a 
letter, whether inadvertently or knowingly, is, 
of course, a serious offence. (German spies are 
everywhere.) When I have endorsed all my 

18 



The Tale of a Tub 19 

platoon's letters, the responsibility for their 
contents rests on my shoulders and the men run 
no risks. 

If I were an imitative bird now, you would find 
my letter reading something after this style: 

"Just a few lines to let you know how we are 
getting on, hoping this finds you in the pink as it 
leaves me at present. We are getting very near 
the Germans now, and you can take it from me 
they'll get what for when we come up with 'em. 
The grub here is champion, but we are always 
ready for more, and I shan't be sorry to get that 
parcel you told me of. Please put in a few fags 
next time. The French people have a queer way 
of talking so you can't always understand all 
they say, but they're all right, I can tell you, 
when you get to know 'em, and I can sling their 
bat like one o'clock now. It's quite easy once 
you get the hang of it, this bong jor and pang 
parley voo. Milk is lay, and not too easy to get. 
The boys are all in the pink, and hoping you're 
the same, so no more at present," etc. 

One sometimes gets mad with them for trifles, 
but for all the things that really matter — God 
bless 'em all ! By Jove! they are Britons. They're 
always "in the pink" and most things are "cham- 



20 



A "Temporary Gentleman** 



pion," and when the ration-wagon's late and a 
man drops half his whack in the mud, he grins 
and says, "The Army of to-day's all right"; and 
that, wait till he gets into the trenches, he'll 
smarten the Boches up for that! Oh, but they 
are splendid; and though one gets into the way 
of thinking and saying one's own men are the best 
in the Army, yet, when one means business one 
knows very well the whole of the New Army's 
made of the same fine stuff. Why, in my platoon, 
and in our Company for that matter, they are every 
mother's son of them what people at home call 
rough, ignorant fellows. And I admit it. Rough 
they certainly are; and ignorant, too, by school 
standards. But, by Jingo! their hearts are in 
the right place, and I'd back any one of them 
against any two goose-stepping Boches in the 
Kaiser's Prussian Guard. 

And, with it all, mind you, they're so English. 
I mean they are kind, right through to their 
bones; good fellows, you know; sportsmen, every 
one of 'em; fellows you'd trust to look after your 
mother. They're as keen as mustard to get to 
the strafing of Boches; but that's because the 
Boche is the enemy, war is war, and duty is duty. 
You couldn't make haters of 'em, not if you paid 



The Tale of a Tub 21 

'em all ambassadorial salaries to cultivate a scowl 
and sing hymns of hate. Not them. Not all 
the powers of Germany and Austria could make 
baby-killers, women-slayers, and church-destroy- 
ers of these chaps of ours. If I know anything 
about it, they are fine soldiers, but the Kaiser 
himself — "Kayser," they call him — couldn't make 
brutes and bullies of 'em. Warm their blood — 
and, mind you, you can do it easily enough, 
even with a football in a muddy field, when they've 
been oh carrying fatigues all day — and, by Jove! 
there's plenty of devil in 'em. God help the 
men in front of 'em when they've bayonets 
fixed ! But withal they're English sportsmen all 
the time, and a French child can empty their 
pockets and their haversacks by the shedding of 
a few tears. 

But I run on (and my candle runs down) 
and I give you no news. This is our last night 
here, and I ought to be asleep in my flea-bag, for 
we make an early start to-morrow for our first 
go in the trenches. But it's jolly yarning here 
to you, while the whole village is asleep, and no 
chits are coming in, and the Battalion Orderly 
Room over the way is black and silent as the 
grave, except for the sentry's footsteps in the mud. 



22 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

I'm in rather good quarters here, in the Mayor's 
house. When we left that first village — I'm afraid 
I haven't written since — we had three days of 
marching, sleeping in different billets each night. 
Here in this place, twelve miles from the firing 
line, we've had five days; practising with live 
bombs, getting issues of trench kit, and generally 
making last preparations. To-morrow night we 
sleep in tents close to the line and begin going 
into trenches for instruction. 

But, look here, before I turn in, I must just 
tell you about this household and my hot bath last 
night. The town is a queer little place; farming 
centre, you know. The farm-houses are all inside 
the village, and mine — M. le Maire's — is one of the 
best. From the street you see huge great double 
doors, that a laden wagon can drive through, 
in a white wall. That is the granary wall. You 
enter by the big archway into a big open yard, 
the centre part of which is a wide-spreading dung- 
hill and reservoir. All round the yard are sheds 
and stables enclosing it, and facing you at the 
back the low, long white house, with steps leading 
up to the front door, which opens into the kitchen. 
This is also the living-room of M. le Maire and 
his aged mother. Their family lived here before 



The Tale of a Tub 23 

the Revolution, and the three sturdy young women 
and one old, old man employed on the farm, all 
live in the house. 

M. le Maire is a warm man, reputed to have a 
thorough mastery of the English tongue, among 
other things, as a result of "college" education. 
So I gather from the really delightful old mother, 
who, though bent nearly double, appears to run 
the whole show, including the Town Hall opposite, 
our Battalion Headquarters. I have never suc- 
ceeded in inducing the Mayor to speak a word of 
English, but he has a little dictionary like a prayer- 
book, with perfectly blinding print, and somehow 
carries on long and apparently enjoyable conver- 
sations with my batman (who certainly has no 
French) , though, as I say, one never heard a word 
of English on his lips. 

I know what the newspapers are. They pre- 
tend to give you the war news. But I'll bet they'll 
tell you nothing of yesterday's really great event, 
when the Commander of No. 1 Platoon took a 
hot bath, as it were under municipal auspices, 
attended by two Company Headquarters order- 
lies, his own batman, and the cordially expressed 
felicitations of his brother officers, not to mention 
the mayoral household, and the whole of No. 1 



24 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

Platoon, which is billeted in the Mayor's barns 
and outbuildings. Early in the day the best 
wash-tub had been commandeered for this inter- 
esting ceremony, and I fancy it has an even longer 
history behind it than the Mayor's pre-Revolu- 
tion home. It is not definitely known that Marie 
Antoinette used this tub, bathing being an infre- 
quent luxury in her day; but if she had been 
cursed with our modern craze for washing, and 
chanced to spend more than a year or so in this 

mud-set village of M , she certainly would have 

used this venerable vessel, which, I gather, began 
life as the half of a cider barrel, and still does duty 
of that sort on occasion, and as a receptacle for 
the storing of potatoes and other nutritious roots, 
when not required for the more intimate service 
of M. le Maire's mother, for the washing of M. 
le Maire's corduroys and underwear, or by M. le 
Maire himself, at the season of Michaelmas, I 
believe, in connection with the solemn rite of his 
own annual bath, which festival was omitted this 
year out of deference to popular opinion, because 
of the war. 

The household of the Mayor, headed by this 
respected functionary himself, received me at the 
portals of his ancestral home and ushered me most 



The Tale of a Tub 25 

kindly and graciously, if with a dash of grave, 
half -pitying commiseration, to what I thought at 
first was the family vault, though, as I presently 
discovered, it was in reality the mayoral salon or 
best parlour — as seen in war time — draped in 
sacking and year-old cobwebs. Here, after some 
rather embarrassing conversation, chiefly gesticu- 
latory on my side — my conversational long suit 
is "Pas du tout! Merci beaucoup," and "Mais 
oui, Madame," with an occasional " Parfaitement," 
stirred in now and again, not with any meaning, 
but as a kind of guarantee of good faith, because 
I think it sounds amiable, if not indeed like my 
lambs in their billets, " Bien gentil," and " Tres 
convenable, Monsieur." It is thus they are in- 
variably described to me when I go inspecting. 
As I was saying, here I was presently left alone 
with the household cat, two sick rabbits in a sort 
of cage which must once have housed a cockatoo 
or parrot, my own little towel (a torn half, you 
know, designed to reduce valise weight), my sponge 
(but, alack! not my dear old worn-out nail-brush, 
now lying in trenches on Salisbury Plain) , and the 
prehistoric wash-tub, now one quarter filled by 
what the Mayor regarded, I gathered, as perhaps 
the largest quantity of hot water ever accum- 



26 A ••Temporary Gentleman" 

ulated in one place — two kettles and one oil-can 
full, carried by the orderlies. 

The cat and the rabbits watched my subse- 
quent proceedings with the absorbed interest of 
an intelligent mid- Victorian infant at its first pan- 
tomime. The cat, I blush to say, was female, 
and old enough to know better, but I trust the 
rabbits were of my own sex. Anyhow, they were 
sick, so perhaps it doesn't matter. The entire 
mayoral household, with my batman and others, 
were assembled in the big kitchen, separated from 
the chamber of my ablutions only by a door hav- 
ing no kind of fastening and but one hinge. Their 
silence was broken only by an occasional profound 
sigh from the Mayor's aged mother, and three 
sounds of reflective expectoration at considerable 
intervals from the Mayor himself. So I judged 
my bathing to be an episode of rare and anxious 
interest to the mayoral family. 

My feet I anointed copiously with a disgusting 
unguent of great virtue — it's invaluable for light- 
ing braziers when one's only fuel is muddy coke 
and damp chits — called anti-frostbite grease, 
that is said to guard us from the disease known as 
" Trench Feet," rumoured prevalent in our sector 
by reason of the mellow quality and depth of 



The Tale of a Tub 27 

its mud, which, whilst apparently almost liquid, 
yet possesses enough body and bouquet — remem- 
ber how you used to laugh at our auction catalogue 
superlatives in cellar lots? — to rob a man of his 
boots at times. For my hands — chipped about 
a bit now — I used carbolated vaseline. (Do you 
remember the preternaturally slow and wall-eyed 
salesman, with the wart, in the Salisbury shop 
where we bought it?) And then, clothed most 
sumptuously in virginal underwear, I crawled 
into my flea-bag, there to revel from 10.40 p.m. 
to 6 a.m., as I am about to do now, less one hour 
in the morning. How I wish one could consciously 
enjoy the luxury of sleep while sleeping! Good 
night and God bless you ! God bless all the sweet, 
brave waiting women of England, and France, and 
Russia; and I wish I could send a bit of my clean 
comfort to-night to as many as may be of our 
good chaps, and France's bon camarades, out here. 
When next I write we shall have seen a bit of 
the trenches, I hope, and so then you should 
have something more like real news from your 

11 Temporary Gentleman." 



THE TRENCHES AT LAST 

You must forgive my not having sent anything 
but those two Field Service post cards for a whole 
week, but, as our Canadian subaltern, Fosset, 
says, it really has been "some" week. My notion 
was to write you fully my very first impression of 
the trenches, but the chance didn't offer, and 
perhaps it's as well. It couldn't be fresher in 
my mind than it is now, and yet I understand it 
more, and see the thing more intelligently than 
on the first night. 

We are now back in the village of B , three 

miles from our trenches. We are here for three 
days' alleged rest, and then, as a Battalion, take over 
our own Battalion sub-sector of trenches. So far, 
we have only had forty-eight hours in, as a Bat- 
talion; though, as individuals, we have had more. 
When we go in again it will be as a Battalion, under 
our own Brigade and Divisional arrangements, to 
hold our own Brigade front, and be relieved later 
by the other two Battalions of our Brigade. 

28 



The Trenches at Last 29 

"A" Company is, I am sorry to say, in tents for 
these three days out ; tents painted to look like 
mud and grass (for the benefit of the Boche air- 
men) and not noticeably more comfortable than 
mud and grass. An old fellow having the extra- 
ordinary name of Bonaparte Pinchgare, has been 
kind enough to lend us his kitchen and scullery 
for officers' mess and quarters; and we, like the 
men, are contriving to have a pretty good time, 
in despite of chill rain and all-pervading mud. 
We are all more or less caked in mud, but we 
have seen Huns, fired at 'em, been fired at by them, 
spent hours in glaring through rag and tin-decked 
barbed wire at their trenches, and generally feel 
that we have been blooded to trench warfare. 
We have only lost two men, and they will prove 
to be only slightly wounded, I think; one, before 
he had ever set foot in a trench — little Hinkson 
of my No. 2 section — and the other, Martin, of 
No. 3 Platoon, only a few hours before we came 
out. 

Hinkson was pipped by a chance bullet in the 
calf of the leg, as we passed through a wood, be- 
hind the support trench. Very likely a Boche 
loosed that bullet off in mere idleness, a couple of 
thousand yards away; and I doubt if it will mean 



30 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

even a Blighty for Hinkson. He may be put right 
in the Field Ambulance or Clearing Station near 
here, or, at farthest, down at the Base. Or he 
may chance to go across to Blighty — the first 
casualty in the Battalion. The little chap was 
furiously angry over getting knocked out before 
he could spot a Hun through the foresight of his 
rifle, but his mate, Kennedy, has sworn to lay out 
a couple of Boches for Hinkson, before he gets 
back to us, and Kennedy will do it. 

First impressions! Do you know, I think my 
first impression was of the difficulty of finding 
one's way about in a maze of muddy ditches 
which all looked exactly alike, despite a few 
occasional muddy notice-boards perched in odd 
corners: "Princes Street," ' ' Sauchiehall Street," 
"Manchester Avenue," "Stinking Sap," "Carlisle 
Road," and the like. I had a trench map of the 
sector, but it seemed to me one never could pos- 
sibly identify the different ways, all mud being 
alike, and no trench offering anything but mud to 
remember it by. In the front or fire-trench itself, 
the firing line, one can hop up on the fire-step, 
look round quickly between bullets, and get a 
bearing. But in all these interminable communi- 
cation and branch trenches where one goes to 



The Trenches at Last 31 

and fro, at a depth varying from six to ten or 
twelve feet, seeing only clay and sky, how the 
dickens could one find the way? 

And yet, do you know, so quickly are things 
borne in upon you in this crude, savage life of raw 
realities, so narrow is your world, so vital your 
need of knowing it; so unavoidable is your con- 
tinuous alertness, and so circumscribed the field 
of your occupation, that I feel now I know nothing 
else in the world quite so well and intimately as 
I know that warren of stinking mud : the two sub- 
sectors in which I spent last week. Manchester 
Avenue, Carlisle Road, Princes Street, with all 
their side alleys and boggy by-ways! Why, they 
are so photographed on the lining of my brain that, 
if I were an artist (instead of a very muddy sub- 
altern ex-clerk) I could paint the whole thing for 
you — I wish I could. Not only do I know them, 
but I've merely to shut my eyes to see any and 
every yard of them; I can smell them now; I can 
feel the precise texture of their mud. I know 
their hidden holes and traps, where the water lies 
deep. I know to an inch where the bad breaks 
are in the duck-boards that you can't see because 
the yellow water covers them. Find one's way! 
I know them far better than I know the Thames 



32 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

Embankment, the Strand, or Brixton Hill! 
That's not an exaggeration. 

Duck-boards, by- the way, or duck- walks, are 
a kindly invention (of the R.E., I suspect) to 
save soldiers from the bottomless pit, and to 
enable officers on duty to cover rather more than 
a hundred yards an hour in getting along their 
line of trench. Take two six- or eight-feet lengths 
of two inches by four inches' scantling; nail two 
or three inch bits of batten across these with two 
or three inch gaps between, the width of the frame 
being, say, eighteen inches. Thus you have a 
grating six or eight feet long and narrow enough 
to lie easily in the bottom of a trench. If these 
gratings rest on trestles driven deep down into 
the mud, and your trenches are covered by them 
throughout — well, then you may thank God for 
all His mercies and proceed to the more interesting 
consideration of strafing Boches, and avoiding 
being strafed by them. If you haven't got these 
beneficent inventions of the R.E., and you are 
in trenches like ours, then you will devote most of 
your energies to strafing the R.E., or some other 
unseen power for good, through your own head- 
quarters, for a supply of duck-walks, and you will 
(if you are wise) work night and day without check, 



The Trenches at Last 33 

in well and truly laying every single length you 
can acquire. 

("Acquire" is a good, sound word. I would 
never blame a man for stealing duck-walks from 
any source whatsoever — providing, of course, he is 
not so far lost to all sense of decency as to steal 
'em from "A" Company; and even then, if he 
could manage it, his cleverness would almost 
deserve forgiveness; and, equally, of course, that 
he's going to use 'em for their legitimate purpose, 
and not just to squat on in a dug-out ; least of all 
for the absolutely criminal purpose of using as 
fuel.) 

"What a fuss you make about mere things to 
walk on!" perhaps you'll say. "I thought the 
one thing really important was getting to grips 
with the enemy." Mmmf ! Yes. Quite so. It 
is. But, madam, how to do it? "There be ways 
and means to consider, look you, whateffer," 
as Billy Morgan says. (Billy was the commander 
of No. 2 Platoon, you remember, and now, as 
reserve Machine-Gun officer, swanks insufferably 
about "the M.G. Section," shoves most of his 
Platoon work upon me, and will have a dug-out 
of his own. We rot him by pretending to attri- 
bute these things to the influence of his exalted 



34 A *• Temporary Gentleman" 

compatriot, the Minister of Munitions. As a fact, 
they are due to his own jolly hard work, and really 
first-rate abilities.) , 

This trench warfare isn't by any means the 
simple business you might suppose, and neither, 
of course, is any other kind of warfare. There 
can be no question of just going for the enemy 
bald-headed. He wishes you would, of course; 
just as we wish to goodness he would. You have 
to understand that up there about the front line, 
the surrounding air and country can at any moment 
be converted into a zone of living fire — gas, pro- 
jectiles, H.E. (High Explosive, you know) flame, 
bullets, bursting shrapnel. If you raise a ringer 
out of trenches by daylight, you present Fritz 
with a target, which he will very promptly and 
gratefully take, and blow to smithereens. That's 
understood, isn't it? Right. To be able to fight, 
in any sort of old way at all, you must continue 
to live — you and your men. To continue to live 
you must have cover. Hence, nothing is more 
important than to make your trenches habitable, 
and feasible ; admitting, that is, of fairly easy and 
quick communication. 

To live, you see, you must eat and drink. The 
trenches contain no ABC's. Every crumb of 



The Trenches at Last 35 

bread, every drop of tea or water, like every car- 
tridge you fire, must be carried up from the rear 
on men's shoulders, along many hundreds of yards 
of communicating trenches. Also, in case you 
are suddenly attacked, or have to attack, quick 
movement is vital. Nature apparently abhors 
a trench, which is a kind of a vacuum, and not 
precisely lovable, anyhow; and, in this part of 
the world, she proceeds wherever possible to fill 
it with water. Pumps? Why, certainly. But 
clay arid slush sides cave in. Whizz-bangs and 
H.E. descend from on high displacing much por- 
ridge-like soil. Men hurrying to and fro day and 
night, disturb and mash up much earth in these 
ditches. And, no matter how or why, there is 
mud; mud unspeakable and past all computation. 
Consider it quietly for a moment, and you will 
feel as we do about duck-walks — I trust the in- 
ventor has been given a dukedom — and realise the 
pressing importance of various material details 
leading up to that all-important strafing of 
Boches. 

But there, the notion of trying to tell you about 
trenches in one letter is, I find, hopelessly beyond 
me, and would only exhaust you, even if I could 
bring it off. I can only hope gradually to get 



36 A " Temporary Gentleman •• 

some sort of a picture into your mind, so that you 
will have a background of sorts for such news of 
our doings as I'm able to send you as we go on. 
Just now, I am going to tackle an alarming stack 
of uncensored letters from Nos. i and 2 Platoons 
— some of the beggars appear to be extraordinarily 
polygamous in the number of girls they write to; 
bless 'em! — and then to turn in and sleep. My 
goodness, it's a fine thing, sleep, out of trenches! 
But I'll write again, probably to-morrow. 

The men are all remarkably fit and jolly. One 
or two old hands here have told me the line we 
are taking over is really pretty bad. Certainly it 
was a revelation to our fellows, after the beauti- 
ful, clean tuppenny-tubes of trenches we con- 
structed on Salisbury Plain. But one hears no 
grousing at all, except of the definitely humorous 
and rather pleased kind — rather bucked about it, 
you know — the men are simply hungry for a 
chance to "get" at the Hun, and they work like 
tigers at trench betterment. We are all well and 
jolly, and even if sometimes you don't hear often, 
there's not the slightest need to worry in any way 
about your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman, ' ' 



A DISSERTATION ON MUD 

The second of our rest days is over, and to- 
morrow night we shall go into the firing line and 

relieve the s. We shall march back the way 

we camp out, down the sad-looking green valley 
round the lips of which some of our batteries are 

hidden; through the deserted streets of , 

with its boarded-up shops and houses; on over 
the weed-grown railway track, through a little 
village whose church is still unbroken ; though few 
of its cottage windows have any glass left in them ; 
across the busy little river to Ambulance Corner 
— a favourite target for Boche shells, that bit of 
road — and so through the wooded hollow where 
the German gas lies deadly thick when it comes, 
into the foot of Manchester Avenue, the long com- 
munication trench leading up to the Battalion's 
trench headquarters in the support line, where 
"A" Company will branch off to the right, "B" 
to the left, and "C" to the extreme left of our 
sub-sector. 

37 



38 A •• Temporary Gentleman " 

That town I mentioned — not the little village 
close to Ambulance Corner, where most roofs and 
walls show shell-torn rents and a few are smashed 
to dust — is rather like a city of the dead. It has 
a cathedral which the gentle Hun has ranged on 
with thoughtful f rightfulness. But though, under 
the guidance of his aerial observers, the Boche 
has smashed up that cathedral pretty thoroughly, 
and its tower has great gaping chunks riven out 
of its sides by shells, yet, as folk say miraculously, 
its crowning attraction, a monstrous gilt figure 
of the Madonna and Child, thirty to fifty feet 
high, remains intact. But this remarkable gilt 
statue has been undermined at its base by H.E. 
shell, and now hangs over at right angles to the 
street far below it — a most extraordinary sight. 
The devout naturally claim that no German pro- 
jectile will prove powerful enough to lower the 
sacred emblem any farther. Boche savagery in 
France has not weakened anyone's faith, I think; 
possibly the reverse. 

A foundry or factory near by is now a tangled 
mass of scrap iron, and as one marches through 
the town one has queer intimate glimpses of de- 
serted bedroom interiors, with homely furnishings 
exposed to all the weather, where a shell has sliced 



A Dissertation on Mud 39 

one wall clean down from a first or second storey 
and left the ground floor intact. 

But I was going to tell you about trenches. 
When I first began to walk up Manchester Avenue, 
my thought was, "There's nothing much to grum- 
ble at here. I call this pretty good. A little 
sloppy under foot perhaps, but really nothing to 
write home about." I've often laughed at "that 
since. For several hundred yards it cuts through 
a ridge of chalk. It is wide enough to enable 
one to pass a man in it anywhere with comfort. 
Its parapet and parados tower white, clean, and 
unbroken a foot or so over your head. Its sides 
are like the sides of a house or a tunnel ; good, dry, 
solid chalk, like our Salisbury trenches, with never 
a sign of caving in about them. And on the hard 
bottom under foot — perhaps two or three inches 
of nice clean chalky slime and water. It has a 
gentle gradient which makes it self -draining. 

You could easily go right up it to Battalion 
Headquarters in the support trench in ordinary 
marching boots, and be none the worse. And 
since then I've known what it means to get a 
bootful of muddy water, when wearing trench 
boots; rubber thigh-boots, you know, with straps 
buckling to your belt. The change begins a little 



40 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

way above the Battalion Headquarters dug-out, 
in support line. You leave the chalk behind you 
and get into clay, and then you leave the clay be- 
hind you and get into yellow porridge and treacle. 
And then you come to a nice restful stretch of a 
couple of hundred yards or so, in which you pray 
for more porridge; and it seems you're never 
coming to any more. This is a vein of glue in the 
section which "A" will go to-morrow night. 

"Very old and curious!" "Remarkably fine, 
full body!" Oh! that glue vein is from the end 
bin, genuine old-vatted, I can assure you. It 
must have eaten up some hundreds of pairs of 
boots by now, and a regular Noah's Ark full of 
trench stores, ammunition, and other useful 
material. 

The glue vein probably had a bottom in bygone 
days, but now I fancy the Hun has knocked the 
bottom out of it. In any case, we never met 
anyone who had found bottom in that bit of line, 
and as the tallest man in the company is only six 
foot two, I hope we never shall. At first you 
think you will skip along quick, like skating fast 
on very thin ice, and with feet planted far apart, 
so as to get the support of the trench sides. That 
bit of trench is possessed of devils, and they laugh 



A Dissertation on Mud 41 

when you stretch your legs, meaning to get 
through with it as quick as you can. The glue's 
so thick and strong, after the soupy stuff you've 
been wading through, that you welcome the solid 
look of it. (That's where the devils begin their 
chuckling.) 

Perhaps at the first few steps you only sink 
about a foot, leaving your knees easily clear. 
"Oh! come!" you say (and that's where the devils 
of the glue patch laugh out loud). At the next 
step you go in a little deeper, and in your inno- 
cence give quite a sharp tug to lift your foot. 
You lift it all right, perhaps half-way up the leg 
of your boot, possibly ripping off a brace button 
in the process, if you've been unwise enough to 
fasten up the top straps of your boots that way. 
(The devils go on laughing.) Then you pause, 
reflectively, while shoving your foot down in 
your boot again, and take a good look round you, 
wondering what sort of a place you've struck. 
(This is where the devils have to hold their sides 
in almost painful hilarity.) 

While you reflect you sink, so slowly and softly 
that you don't notice it till you try the next step. 
And then, with the devils of that section roaring 
their ugly Hunnish heads off all round you, if 



42 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

you have no better luck than Tommy Dodd had, 
his first night in, you may continue reflecting for 
quite a long while,' till somebody comes along 
who knows that particular health resort. Then 
two or three Samaritans with picks and shovels 
and a post or two will be brought, and, very labori- 
ously, you'll be dug and levered out; possibly 
with your boots, possibly without either them or 
your socks. 

But what reduces the devils to helpless, tear- 
ful contortions of merriment, is a coincidental 
decision on the part of a Boche gunner to start 
peppering that bit of trench with shrap., or a 
machine-gun, during your reflective period. Then 
it's great; a really first-class opportunity for re- 
viewing the errors of your past life. 

After this substantial piece de resistance (yes, 
thanks, I'm progressing very nicely with my 
French this term), you come to a delicately re- 
freshing dessert in Sauchiehall Street, where the 
water lies very deep in most parts, but so sweetly 
liquid as to wash the glue well off up to our coat 
pockets. This innocent stuff can be pumped out 
quite easily, and is pumped out every day, into 
a gully, which we devoutly hope leads well into a 
Boche sap. But pump as you will, it fills up very 



A Dissertation on Mud 43 

rapidly. And so, with new washed boots (and 
coat pockets) to Whizz-bang Corner, where 
Sauchiehall Street enters the fire trench, and the 
Hun loves to direct his morning and evening hymns 
of hate in the hope of catching tired ration-car- 
riers, and, no doubt, of spilling their rations. It 
was there that Martin of No. 3 Platoon got his 
quietener on the morning we came out. But with 
luck and no septic trouble, he'll be back in a month 
or so. The surroundings are a bit toxic, as you 
may imagine. That's why, after even the slight- 
est wound, they inoculate with anti-tetanus — 
marvellously successful stuff. 

The fire trench in this particular bit is rather a 
mockery, as "the Peacemaker" said, when he 
tried to climb out of it, our first night in, to have 
a look at the barbed wire and No Man's Land. 
He had a revolver in one hand and a bomb in 
the other, but I am pleased to say the safety-pin 
of that bomb was efficient ; and, in any case, I re- 
lieved him of it after he fell back the second time. 
The sides of that trench have been so unmercifully 
pounded by the Boche, and the rain has been so 
persistent of late that the porridge here is more 
like gruel than the breakfast dish, and the average 
sand-bag in the parapet, when not submerged, 



44 A "Temporary Gentleman** 

is as unfriendly to get a grip on, as one of those 
crustaceous pink bombs they sometimes swindle 
you with at restaurants. You know, the kind 
you chase round your plate and find splinter-proof. 

Thirty or forty yards north from Whizz-bang 
Corner, in the fire trench, you come to a loop turn 
to the rear called Whitehall, not because there's 
a War Office there, but because there's a queer 
little vein of chalk which disappointingly peters 
out again in less than a dozen paces. That leads 
to the Company Headquarters dug-out ; an extra- 
ordinary hole, I thought, when I first saw it; a 
jolly nice, homely dug-out I think it now, and with 
a roof — well, not shell-proof, you know, but water- 
tight, and quite capable of standing a whizz or 
a grenade, or anything short of serious H.E. You 
stride over a good little dam and then down two 
steps to get into it, and it has a real door, carried 
up, I suppose, from the village in the rear. It also 
has a gilt-edged looking-glass, a good packing- 
case table, the remains of two wooden chairs, 
two shelves made of rum- jar cases, and two good 
solid wire-strung bunks, one over the other. 
There's no doubt it is some dug-out. 

And, madam, don't you go for to think that 
there's anything contemptible about our trenches, 



A Dissertation on Mud 45 

anyhow. Perhaps I pitched it a bit strong about 
that glue patch. In any case, I promise you two 
things: (1) They'll be very different trenches 
before long if "A" Company has two or three 
turns of duty in them. (2) They're every bit as 
good as, and a bit better than, the trenches oppo- 
site, where the Hun is ; and I know it because I've 
been there. I meant to have told you of that to- 
night, but I've left it too late, and must wait for 
my next letter. But it's quite right. I've had a 
look at their front line and found it distinctly 
worse than ours, and got back without a scratch, 
to sign myself still your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman . ' ' 



TAKING OVER ON A QUIET NIGHT 

Last evening brought an end to our rest cure, 
as I told you it would, and saw us taking over 
out section of the firing line. Now I have just 
turned into the Company dug-out for a rest, 
having been pretty much on the hop all night 
except for a short spell between two and four this 
morning. As I think I told you, this is not at all 
a bad dug-out, and quite weather-proof. It has 
two decent bunks one over the other. We all 
use it as a mess, and "the Peacemaker," Taffy 
Morgan, and myself use it for sleeping in; Tony 
and "the Infant" kipping down (when they get 
the chance) in a little tiny dug-out that we made 
ourselves when we were in here for instruction, 
just the other side of Whizz-bang Corner, in the 
fire trench. 

You remember "the Infant," don't you? No. 
4 Platoon. His father's doctoring now in the 
R.A.M.C. He's a nice boy, and has come on a 
lot since we got out here. He was to have been 

46 



Taking Over on a Quiet Night 47 

a land surveyor, or something of that sort, and 
has a first-rate notion of trench work and anything 
like building. 

In writing to you I'd like to avoid, if I could, 
what seems to be a pretty common error among 
men at the front, and one that leads to some 
absurd misapprehensions among people at home. 
I remember listening once in a tram-car at home 
to two Tommies, one of whom had returned from 
the front. The other was asking him how they 
managed in the matter of shifting wounded men 
back to some place where they could be attended 
to. 

"Oh! that's simple enough," said the chap 
who'd been out. "They've a regular routine for 
that. You see, there are always barges waiting, 
and when you're wounded they just dump you 
on board a barge and take you down the canal 
to where the dressing station is." 

"I see; so that's the way it's done," said the 
other man. 

And I could see that the impression left on his 
mind was that barges were in waiting on a canal 
right along the five hundred miles of Franco- 
British line. 

You see what I mean. A fellow out here knows 



48 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

only his own tiny bit of front, and he's very apt 
to speak of it as if it were the Front, and folk at 
home are apt to think that whatever is applicable 
to their man's particular mile or so is applicable 
to the whole Front. Which, of course, is wildly 
wrong and misleading. When in trenches one 
battalion may find itself in a wood, another on a 
naked hillside, one in the midst of a ruined village, 
with the cellars of smashed cottages for dug-outs, 
and another with its trenches running alongside 
a river or canal. So don't make the mistake of 
thinking that what I tell you applies to the Front 
generally, although in a great many matters it 
may be typical enough. 

Now you'd like to know about the business of 
taking over these trenches. Well, this was the 
way of it. "The Peacemaker," our noble Com- 
pany Commander, came on here in advance yester- 
day afternoon, with the Company Sergeant-Major. 
Our Company S.M., by the way, is a remarkably 
fine institution, and, I think, the only real ex- 
regular we have in the Company. He's an ex- 
N.C.O. of Marines, and a really splendid fellow, 
who is out now for a V.C., and we all hope he'll 
get it. He and "the Peacemaker" came along 
about three hours ahead of us, leaving me to bring 



Taking Over on a Quiet Night 49 

the Company. "The Peacemaker" went care- 
fully all over this line with the O.C. of the Com- 
pany we relieved, noted the sentry posts and special 
danger spots — unhealthy places, you know, more 
exposed to Boche fire than others — and generally 
took stock and made his plans for us. 

I forgot to say that a Sergeant from each platoon 
accompanied "the Peacemaker" and the S.M., 
so as to be able to guide their respective platoons 
in to their own bits of the line when they arrived. 
Then the S.M. checked over all the trench stores 
— picks, shovels, wire, pumps, small-arm ammuni- 
tion, rockets, mud-scoops, trench repair material, 
and all that — with the list held by the S.M. of 
the Company we were relieving, which our own 
beloved "Peacemaker," had to sign "certified 
correct," you know. Meantime, "the Peace- 
maker" took over from the other O.C. Company 
a report of work done and to be done — repairing 
parapets, laying duck-walks, etc. — though in this 
case I regret to remark the only very noticeable 
thing was the work to be done, or so it seems to us 
— and generally posted himself up and got all 
the tips he could. 

Just about dusk "A" Company led the way 
out of B , and marched the way I told you 



50 A 4< Temporary Gentleman" 

of to Ambulance Corner. Needless to say, they 
presented a fine soldierly appearance, led and 
commanded as they were for the time by your 
"Temporary Gentleman." There was a certain 
liveliness about Ambulance Corner when we 
reached it, as there so frequently is, and I am sorry 
to say poor "B" Company in our rear had two 
men wounded, one fatally. I took "A" Company 
at the double, in single file, with a yard or so be- 
tween men, across the specially exposed bit at 
the corner, and was thankful to see the last of 
'em bolt into the cover of Manchester Avenue 
without a casualty. It gave me some notion 
of the extra anxiety that weighs on the minds of 
O.C. Companies who take their responsibilities 
seriously, as I think most of 'em do. 

Then, when we were getting near Whizz-bang 
Corner, we were met by the four platoon N.C.O.'s 
who had gone on in advance with the Coy. S.M., 
and they guided the platoons to their respective 
sections of our line. Meantime, you understand, 
not a man of the Company we were relieving had 
left the line. The first step was for us to get our 
platoon Sergeants to post sentries to relieve each 
one of those of the other Company, on the fire- 
step, and we ourselves were on hand with each 



Taking Over on a Quiet Night 51 

group, to see that the reliefs thoroughly under- 
stood the information and instructions they got 
from the men they relieved. Then our advance 
N.C.O.'s showed the other men of their platoons 
such dug-outs as were available for them — a 
pretty thin lot in this section, but we shall tackle 
the job of increasing and improving 'em as soon 
as we can, while we Platoon Commanders had a 
buck with the Platoon Commanders of the other 
Company. 

Finally, "the Peacemaker" shook hands with 
the O.C. of the Company we relieved outside 
Company Headquarters — that's this dug-out — 
the other fellow wished him luck, both of them, 
separately, telephoned down to Battalion Head- 
quarters (in the support trenches) reporting the 
completion of the relief, and the last of the other 
Company filed away out down Sauchiehall Street 
to Manchester Avenue, billets and "alleged rest." 
As a matter of fact, they are to get some real 
rest, I believe, another Company of our Brigade 
being billeted in the village just behind the lines 
this week, to do all the carrying fatigues at night 
— bringing up trench-repair material and all that. 

It was a quiet night, with no particular strafing, 
and that's all to the good, because, in the first 



52 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

place, it gives us a better chance to study the line 
again by daylight, and, again, it enables us to get 
on quickly with certain very necessary trench 
repairs. We had half the Company working all 
night at the parapet, which had some very bad 
gaps, representing a serious multiplication of 
unhealthy spots, which have to be passed many 
times day and night, and must always be dangerous 
to pass. The Boche is pretty nippy in locating 
gaps of this sort and getting his snipers and machine- 
gunners to range on them, so that unless they are 
repaired casualties are certain. One repairs them 
by building up the gaps with sand-bags, and for 
these it is necessary to find approximately dry 
earth: a pretty difficult job in this section. 

No strafing and a quiet night! I wonder how 
you, and people generally at home, interpret that? 
"The rest of the Front was quiet"; "Nothing 
of interest to report"; "Tactical situation un- 
changed," and so on. They are the most familiar 
report phrases, of course. 

Well, there was a time last night, or, rather, 
between two and four this morning, when on our 
particular section there was no firing at all beyond 
the dropping rifle fire of the Boche sentries opposite 
and a similar desultory fire from our sentries. 



Taking Over on a Quiet Night 53 

Now and again a bullet so fired may get a man 
passing along a communication trench, or, more 
likely, of course, a man exposed, either on patrol 
in No Man's Land or in working on the parapet. 
More often they hit nobody. During the same 
time, in our particular section, a flare-light went 
up from the Boche line opposite, I suppose about 
every other minute. That's to give their sentries 
a chance of seeing any patrol we may have creep- 
ing about in their direction. 

During all the rest of this quiet night of no 
strafing there was just "normal fire." That is to 
say, the Boche machine-guns sprayed our parapet 
and the intervening bit of No Man's Land, maybe, 
once every quarter of an hour. Their rifle fire 
was more continuous; their flares and parachute 
and star-lights the same. Eight or ten times in 
the night they gave us salvoes of a dozen whizz- 
bangs. Twice — once at about ten, and again 
about twelve — they gave our right a bit of a 
pounding with H.E., and damaged the parapet a 
little. Once they lobbed four rifle grenades over 
our left from a sap they have on that side. But 
we had been warned about that, and gave 'em 
gyp for it. We had a machine-gun trained on that 
sap-head of theirs, and plastered it pretty effec- 



54 A •• Temporary Gentleman " 

tually, so quickly that I think we must have got 
their grenadiers. They shut up very promptly, 
anyhow, and a bombing patrol of ours that got to 
the edge of their sap half an hour later found not 
a creature there to bomb. 

Our fire during the night was similar to theirs, 
but a bit less. "The Peacemaker" has a strong 
prejudice in favour of saving his ammunition for 
use on real live targets, and I think he's right. 
We had one man slightly wounded, and that's all. 
And I think that must be admitted to be pretty 
good, seeing that we were at work along the para- 
pet all night. That is a specimen of a really 
quiet night. 

At Stand-to this morning Fritz plastered our 
parapet very thoroughly with his machine-guns, 
evidently thinking we were Johnny Raws. He 
wasted hundreds of rounds of ammunition over 
this. We were all prepared. Not a head showed, 
and my best sniper, Corporal May, got one of 
their machine-gun observers neatly through the 
head. Our lines are only a hundred yards apart 
just there. 

But I must turn in, old thing, or I'll get no rest 
to-day. I know I haven't told you about the 
look I had at the Boche trenches. But perhaps 



Taking Over on a Quiet Night 55 

111 have something better to tell when I next 
write. 

Meantime, we are as jolly as sand-boys, and 
please remember that you need not be in the least 
anxious about your 

" Temporary Gentleman" 



"WHAT IT'S LIKE" 

The wonder is, not that I didn't get the one post 
card you mention, but that you apparently have 
had everything I have written. Really, I do 
think the British postal arrangements out here are 
one of the most remarkable features of the war. 
The organisation behind our lines is quite extra- 
ordinary. Right up here in the firing line itself 
we get our letters and parcels every day. In the 
midst of a considerable bombardment I have seen 
fellows in artillery shelters in the line reading 
letters and opening parcels of little luxuries just 
received from home. 

It's very nice of you to copy out my letters for 
friends at home to read. One simply can't hope 
to write to a number of different people, you know, 
because any spare time going one wants to use 
for sleep. I'm sorry I've omitted to tell you 
about some things I promised to explain, and 
must try to do better. 

As to the time I saw into the Boche trenches 
56 



"What It's Like" 57 

while we were in for instruction, that was nothing 
really; due to my own stupidity, as a matter of 
fact, and I dare say that's why I said nothing 
about it. It was our second night in for instruc- 
tion, and the Company we were with was sending 
out a small bombing patrol, so, of course, I asked 
if I could go too, and see what was to be seen. 
The O.C. of the Company very kindly let me 
go, and take with me Corporal Slade, of my 
platoon, an excellent chap, and very keen to 
learn. I wish he could have had a better teacher. 

While close to the Boche wire our little party — 
only five, all told — sighted a Boche patrol quite 
twenty strong, and our officer in charge very 
properly gave the word to retire to a flank and 
get back to our own trench, or, rather, to a sap 
leading from it, so as to give warning of the 
Boche patrol. This was where, in my experience, 
I went wrong and led Slade astray. I was very 
curious, of course, to have a good look at the 
Boche patrol — the first I'd seen of the enemy in 
the open — and, like a fool, managed to get de- 
tached from the other three of our lot, Slade 
sticking close to me with a confidence I didn't 
deserve. 

When I realised that the others were clean out 



58 A "Temporary Gentleman ** 

of sight, and the Boche party too, I made tracks 
as quickly as I could — crawling, you know — as 
I believed for our line, cursing myself for not 
having a compass, a mistake you may be sure I 
shall not make again. Just then a regular fire- 
work display of flares went up from the Boche 
line, and they opened a hot burst of machine-gun 
fire. We lay as close as we could in the soggy 
grass, Slade and myself, and got no harm. Things 
were lively for a while, with lots of fire from both 
sides, and more light from both sides than was 
comfortable. 

Later, when things had quietened down, we 
got on the move again, and presently, after a 
longish crawl through barbed wire, reached the 
parapet, and were just about to slide in, side by 
side, pretty glad to be back in the trench, when 
a fellow came round the traverse — we were just 
beside a traverse — growled something, and jabbed 
at Slade with his bayonet. 

Bit confusing, wasn't it? Makes you think 
pretty quick. I suppose we realised we had struck 
the Boche line instead of our own in something 
under the twentieth part of a second, and what 
followed was too confused for me to remember 
much about. No doubt we both recognised the 



-What It's Like" 59 

necessity for keeping that chap quiet in the same 
fraction of time that we saw we had reached the 
wrong trenches. I can remember the jolly feel- 
ing of my two thumbs in his throat. It was jolly, 
really, though I dare say it will seem beastly to 
you. And I suspect Slade did for the chap. We 
were lying on a duck-board at the bottom of the 
trench, and I know my little trench dagger fell 
and made a horrid clatter, which I made sure 
would bring more Boches. But it didn't. 

I am sorry to say I left the little dagger there, 
but I collared the Boche's rifle and bayonet, 
thinking that was the only weapon I had, and 
clean forgetting the two Mills bombs in my pockets. 
Slade was a perfect brick and behaved all through 
like the man he is. We were anxious to make 
tracks without unnecessary delay, but, being 
there, thought we might as well have a look at 
the trench. We crept along two bays without 
hearing or seeing a soul. And then we heard a 
man struggling in deep mud and cursing in fluent 
German. I've thought since, perhaps, we ought 
to have waited for him and tried a bomb on him. 
But at the same time came several other different 
voices, and I whispered to Slade to climb out 
and followed him myself without wasting any 



60 A "Temporary Gentleman** 

time. The trench was a rotten bad one at this 
point, worse, I think, than any of ours. And I 
was thankful for it, because if it had been good 
those Boches would surely have been on us before 
we could get out. As it was, the mud held them, 
and the noises they made grovelling about in it 
prevented them from hearing our movements, 
though we made a good deal of noise, worrying 
through their wire, especially as I was dragging 
that Boche rifle, with bayonet fixed. 

There were glimmering hints of coming daylight 
by the time we got into the open, which made it 
a bit easier to take a bearing, and also pretty 
necessary to have done with it quickly, because 
in another half -hour we should have been a target 
for the whole Boche line. Here again Slade was 
first-rate. He recognised a big shell-hole in the 
ground, which he had noticed was about fifty 
yards north of the head of a sap leading from our 
own line, and that guided us in to the same open- 
ing in our wire from which we had originally 
started. Fine chap, Slade! Three minutes later 
we were in our own trench, and I got a good tot 
of rum for both of us from the O.C. Company, 
who'd made up his mind he'd have to report us 
"Missing." So, you see, you didn't miss much 



••What It's Like" 61 

by not being told all about this before, except an 
instance of carelessness on my part, which might 
have been more costly if I hadn't had a most 
excellent chap with me. "The Peacemaker's " 
going to recommend him for Lance-Sergeant's 
stripes, by the way, when we get out of trenches 
this time. 

You know, that question of yours about what 
it is really "like" here at the front isn't nearly 
so easy to answer as you might suppose. You 
must just be patient. I'll tell you things as I 
learn them and see them, gradually; and, gradu- 
ally, too, you must try to piece 'em together till 
they make some sort of picture for you. If I 
were a real writer I might be able to make it all 
clear in one go, but — well, it's not easy. 

I've told you about the trenches on the way 
up from Ambulance Corner, the communication 
trenches, that is, running up at right angles to 
the firing line. The chief difference between the 
firing line and the communication trenches, of 
course, is that it faces the Boche front line, run- 
ning roughly parallel to it, and that, say eighteen 
inches above the bottom of it, there is a fire-step 
running along its front side. When you get up 
on that you have a fire position: that is, you 



62 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

can see over the parapet, across No Man's Land, 
to the Boche front line, and fire a rifle. 

The lines of trenches are not straight, of course. 
They curve about according to the nature of the 
ground. Running out from them on both sides 
towards the enemy lines there are saps, at the 
end of which we station listening posts at night 
with wired-up telephone and bell connections 
with the firing line. Roughly speaking, a fire 
trench is cut out rather like this : 



with traverses every twenty or thirty paces, so 
as to make it impossible for an enemy on your 
flank to get what is called enfilade fire down and 
along the trench. Enfilade fire is deadly, of 
course. Fire from the front, on the other hand, 
if it falls short or overshoots the mark even by 
a yard lands in front of or behind your trench. 
You get that? 

And what does it look like when one stares out 
from one's front trench? Well, it depends. It's 
always pretty queer, but it's queerest at night, 
when the Boche is sending up his ghostly flares, 
or when there's enough moonlight to make you 



"What It's Like" 63 

fancy all the time you can see all manner of things. 
First, there's your own parapet, anything from 
five to five-and- twenty feet of it, sloping gradu- 
ally down to the open grass of No Man's Land. 
That's what stops the bullets destined for your 
head. When Boche shells are well enough placed 
to blow it in, you must build it up again as soon 
as you can, or the bit of trench behind it will be 
exposed, and as your men pass to and fro there 
will be casualties. 

Well, / then, anything from ten to twenty or 
thirty feet beyond the lip of your trench, your 
wire entanglements begin, and extend, say a good 
thirty or forty paces out into No Man's Land. 
You've seen barbed-wire entanglements in pic- 
tures: row after row of stakes (some of ours are 
iron screw standards now, that can be set up 
silently) laced together across and across by barbed 
wire, forming an obstacle which it is particularly 
difficult and beastly to get through, especially at 
night, which, of course, is the only time you 
could even approach it without being blown to 
bits. 

Here and there all through our wire are old 
bells, tin cans, bits of flattened tin, and oddments 
of that sort hanging loosely, so that when even a 



64 A •'Temporary Gentleman •• 

rat begins cavorting about in the wire at night 
your sentries know about it, and the Boche is 
neither so slim nor so agile as a rat. Say that he 
comes by night with bombs in his hand. One 
cannot throw a bomb with any accuracy of aim 
more than twenty or thirty yards. Boche finds 
himself stopped by our wire, say fifty or sixty 
yards from our line. If he slowly worms himself 
in, say twenty paces, without being heard — and 
he won't — and lobs a bomb at our line, imagine 
the hail of lead that's coming about him as he 
tries to wriggle his way back through the wire 
after shying his bomb ! 

But, as a matter of fact, the Boche is not good 
at that game. He does not shine at all at creep- 
in on our line. When he leaves his trenches at all 
he seems to prefer coming out in pretty close 
formation, rubbing shoulders with his pals. Our 
fellows are a good deal better at sculling about 
over the sticks than he is. 

Here and there in the wire, among the tin cans 
and things, you can see fluttering bits of weather- 
worn uniform and old rags, and, at times, things 
more gruesome. Beyond the wire you see the 
strip of No Man's Land. Where we are, the 
average width of it is round about a hundred 



"What It's Like" 65 

yards. In some places it's more, and in one place 
we can see, perhaps a mile off, it narrows down to 
much less than half that. Then begins the Boche 
wire, and through and across that you see the 
Boche front line, very much like your own, too 
much like your own to be very easily distinguished 
from it at night. 

But that's a wonderful thing, that strip we call 
No Man's Land, running from the North Sea to 
Switzerland, five hundred miles. All the way 
along that line, day and night, without a moment's 
cessation, through all these long months, men's 
eyes have been glaring across that forsaken strip, 
and lead has been flying to and fro over it. To 
show yourself in it means death. But I have heard 
a lark trilling over it in the early morning as sweetly 
as any bird ever sang over an English meadow. 
A lane of death, five hundred miles long, strewn 
from end to end with the remains of soldiers! 
And to either side of it, throughout the whole of 
these five hundred miles, a warren of trenches, 
dug-outs, saps, tunnels, underground passages, 
inhabited, not by rabbits, but by millions of 
rats, it's true, and millions of hiving, busy men, 
with countless billions of rounds of death-dealing 
ammunition, and a complex organisation as 



66 A •• Temporary Gentleman" 

closely ordered and complete as the organisation 
of any city in England ! 

It's also inhabited at this moment by one man 
who simply must stop scribbling, and have some 
grub before going on duty. This one among the 
millions, with the very healthy appetite, manages, 
in despite of all the strafing, to think quite a lot 
about you, and hopes you will go on thinking 
equally cheerily of him — your 

"Temporary Gentleman. 1 ' 



THE DUG-OUT 

Here's an odd coincidence. The second sentence 
in your letter that reached me last night (with 
our rations of candles and coke) says: "Do 
tell me just what a dug-out is like." You are 
always asking me what something or other is 
"like," which forces upon me the sad conclusion 
that my letters are not in the least descriptive. 
But, "Do not shoot the pianist: he is doing his 
best," and if I had the pen of a readier writer you 
may be sure I'd use it. Yet the odd thing is, with 
regard to this particular command for informa- 
tion, I have the pen of a readier writer. You 
know Taffy Morgan — Billy — of our Company? 
Well, it seems he's quite a bit of a writer, and 
occasionally sends things home to his father who, 
is trying to keep a consecutive narrative of the 
doings of the Battalion. Now last night, within 
an hour of getting your letter, I read a thing Taffy 
showed me that he was sending home, all about 
a Company Headquarters dug-out in the line: 

67 



68 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

much more decent than my scribbles. So I've 
asked him to let me copy some of it, and here it 
is pat, in answer to your question : 

" 'Dug-out' is the only word for it. I don't 
know who did the christening, but it is, like so 
many words and phrases adopted without ques- 
tion by Tommy at the front, the one proper, exact, 
and adequate name for the places we inhabit in 
the trenches. The particular dug-out I have in 
mind is a Company Headquarters, situated, like 
a good many others, in a loop trench, perhaps 
seventy to a hundred yards long, which curves 
round at a distance of twenty or thirty yards in 
rear of the fire-trench. The average depth of this 
little back-water of a trench is, say, seven feet. 
It was made by the French before we took over, 
and is very wide at the top. It has no made para- 
pet, but is just a gaping ditch, its ragged, receding 
top edges eight or ten feet apart, the lower part, 
in which one walks, being two to three feet wide. 
The bottom of this ditch is duck-walked: that is 
to say, it has wooden gratings six feet long and 
eighteen inches wide laid along it. Each length 
of duck- walk is supported at either end by a 
trestle driven deep down into the mud. 

"Here and there at a bend in the trench there 



The Dug-Out 69 

will be a gap of several inches between duck- walks. 
Again one finds a place where one or two slats 
have been broken. These are cheerless pitfalls 
on a dark night, in which it is easy to sink one leg 
in mud or water over the knee. In places a duck- 
walk has canted over by losing its bearings on the 
trestle at one corner, giving the whole a treacherous 
list to one side or the other, simple enough to 
negotiate by day, but unpleasant for anyone hurry- 
ing along at night. Still, the trench is 'ducked' 
and, so far, luxurious, and a vast improvement on 
the sort of trench (common over the way among 
the Boches, I believe) in which men lose their 
boots, and have to be dug out themselves. 

"It happens that my picture of this Company 
Headquarters dug-out is a three o'clock in the 
morning picture : moonless, and the deadest hour 
of the night, when Brother Boche is pretty gener- 
ally silent, save for a mechanical sort of drop- 
ping rifle fire: a fire which one knows somehow, 
from its sound, means nothing, unless perhaps it 
means a certain number of German sentries sleepily 
proving to themselves, that they are awake. In 
the same desultory fashion, Boche, nearly two 
hundred yards away across the wire entangle- 
ments and the centre strip of No Man's Land, 



70 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

sends up a flare of parachute light every few 
minutes, which, for half a minute, fills our black 
ditch with a queer, ghostly sort of radiance, mak- 
ing its dank and jagged sides to gleam again, 
and drawing curses from anyone feeling his way 
along it, even as motor lights in a country lane 
at home make a pedestrian curse on a dark night. 

"As one gropes along this ditch one comes to 
narrow gaps here and there in the side farthest 
from the enemy. These lead to all kinds of odd 
necessary places: the homes of signallers, runners, 
and others, refuse pits, bomb and trench stores, 
and so on. Presently a thin streak of light shows 
like a white string in the blackness. This is one 
of the gaps, about four feet high and eighteen 
inches wide. A dripping waterproof sheet hangs 
as a curtain over this gap : the white string is the 
light from within escaping down one side of the 
sheet. Lift the sheet to one side, take two steps 
down and forward — the sheet dripping on your 
neck the while — and you are in the Company 
Headquarters dug-out : a hole dug out of the back 
of the ditch, its floor two feet below the level of 
the duck-boards outside, its internal dimensions 
ten feet by eight by six. 

"At the back of this little cave, facing you as 



The Dug-Out 71 

you enter — and unless you go warily you are apt 
to enter with a rush, landing on the earthen floor 
in a sitting position, what with the wet slime on 
your gum boots and the steps — are two bunks, 
one above the other, each two feet wide and made 
of wire netting stretched on rough stakes fastened 
to stout poles and covered more or less by a few 
empty sand-bags. One of these is the bunk of 
the O.C. Company, used alternatively by one of 
his subalterns. In the other, a Platoon Com- 
mander lies now asleep, one gum-booted leg, 
mud-caked well above the knee, dangling over 
the front edge, a goatskin coat over his shoulders, 
his cap jammed hard down over his eyes to shut 
out the light of the candle which, stayed firmly 
to the newspaper tablecloth by a small island of 
its own grease, burns as cheerily as it can in this 
rather draughty spot, sheltered a little from the 
entrance by a screen consisting of a few tins half 
full of condensed milk, butter, sugar, and the like. 
The officer in the bunk is sleeping as though dead, 
and the candle-light catching the mud-flecked 
stubble on his chin suggests that his turn in the 
trenches should be at least half over. Another 
few days should bring him to billets and shaving 



72 A •• Temporary Gentleman" 

(Here, then, in addition to the description of a 
dug-out, you have a portrait of your "Temporary 
Gentleman," rather unmercifully touched in, I 
thought!) 

"The table — say, 30 inches by 20 inches — was 
made from a packing-case, and is perched on 
rough stake legs against the earthen side of the 
dug-out, with a shelf over it which was formerly 
a case holding two jars of rum. On the shelf 
are foodstuffs, Very lights, a couple of rockets, a 
knobkerrie, a copy of Punch, a shortbread tin full 
of candles, a map, an automatic pistol, and, most 
curiously, a dust-encrusted French cookery-book, 
which has taken on the qualities of an antique, 
and become a kind of landlord's fixture among 
'trench stores' in the eyes of the ever-changing 
succession of company commanders who have 
'taken over,' week in and week out, since the 
French occupation in '14. 

"Hung about the sides of the dug-out are half- 
empty canvas packs or valises, field-glasses, a 
couple of periscopes, a Very pistol, two sticks caked 
all over with dry mud, an oilskin coat or two simi- 
larly varnished over with the all-pervading mud 
of the trench, a steel helmet, a couple of pairs of 
field boots and half a dozen pictures from illus- 



The Dug-Out 73 

trated papers, including one clever drawing of a 
grinning cat, having under it the legend, 'Smile, 
damn you!' The field boots are there, and not 
in use, because the weather is of the prevalent sort, 
wet, and the tenants of the place are living in 
what the returns call ' boots, trench, gum, thigh. ' 
Overhead is stretched across the low roof tarred 
felt. Above that are rough-hewn logs, then gal- 
vanised iron and stones and earth: not shell- 
proof, really, but bullet- and splinter-proof, and 
for the most part weather-proof — at least as much 
so as the average coat sold under that description. 
"The trench outside is very still just now, but 
inside the dug-out there is plenty of movement. 
All round about it, and above and below, the place 
is honeycombed by rats — brown rats with whitish 
bellies, big as young cats, heavy with good living; 
blundering, happy-go-lucky, fearless brutes, who 
do not bother to hunt the infinitely nimbler mice 
who at this moment are delicately investigating 
the tins of foodstuffs within a few inches of the 
head of the O.C. Company. The rats are vari- 
ously occupied: as to a couple of them, matrons, 
in opposite corners of the roof, very obviously 
in suckling their young, who feed with awful zest ; 
as to half a dozen others, in courting, during which 



74 A "Temporary Gentleman " 

process they keep up a curious kind of crooning, 
chirruping song wearisome to human ears; and as 
to the numerous remainder, in conducting a cross- 
country steeplechase of sorts, to and fro and 
round and round on the top side of the roofing 
felt, which their heavy bodies cause to bulge 
and sag till one fancies it must give way. 

" There is a rough rickety stool beside the table. 
On this is seated the O.C. Company, his arms 
outspread on the little ledge of a table, his head 
on his arms, his face resting on the pages of an 
open Army Book 153, in which, half an hour ago, 
he wrote his morning situation report, in order 
that his signallers might inform Battalion Head- 
quarters, nearly a mile away down the communica- 
tion trench to the rear, with sundry details, that 
there was nothing doing beyond the normal inter- 
mittent strafing of a quiet night. The O.C. Com- 
pany is asleep. A mouse is clearing its whiskers 
of condensed milk within two inches of his left ear, 
and the candle is guttering within two inches of 
his cap-peak. During the past few days he has 
had four or five such sleeps as this, half an hour 
or so at a time, and no more, for there has been 
work toward in the line, involving exposure for 
men on the parapet and so forth, of a sort which 



The Dug-Out 75 

does not make for restfulness among O.C. 
Companies. 

"There comes a quiet sound of footfalls on the 
greasy duck-boards outside. Two mice on the 
table sit bolt upright to listen. The cross-country 
meeting overhead is temporarily suspended. The 
O.C. Company's oilskin-covered shoulders twitch 
nervously. The mother rats continue noisily 
suckling their young, though one warily pokes its 
sharp nose out over the edge of the felt, sniffing 
inquiringly. Then the waterproof sheet is drawn 
aside, and the O.C. Company sits up with a jerk. 
A signaller on whose leather jerkin the raindrops 
glisten in the flickering candle-light thrusts head 
and shoulders into the dug-out. 

" 'Message from the Adjutant, sir!' 

"The O.C. reads the two-line message, initials 
the top copy for return to the signaller, spikes the 
carbon copy on a nail overhead, where many others 
hang, glances at his wrist-watch, and says wearily : 

" 'Well, what are the signallers strafing about, 
anyhow? It's ten minutes before time now. 
Here you are ! ' 

"He tears two written pages from the Army 
message book which was his pillow, signs them, 
and hands them up to the signaller. 



76 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

" 'Call the Sergeant-Major on your way back, 
and tell him I've gone down to the sap-head. He 
can bring the wiring party along right away. 
It's nearly three o'clock. Send a runner to tell 
the officer on duty I'm going out myself with this 
party. You might just remind the Sergeant- 
Major I want two stretcher-bearers at the sap- 
head. Tell 'em to keep out of sight till the 
others are out over the parapet. Right! 

Messages will go to Mr. , of course, while 

I'm out.' 

"Brother Boche may remain quiet. Three 
o'clock is a good quiet time. And there is no 
moon. But, Brother Boche being dead quiet 
just now, may conceivably have patrols out there 
in No Man's Land. They may carry valuable 
information quickly to his line, and two or three 
machine-guns may presently open up on the O.C. 
Company and his wiring party, who, again, may 
be exposed by -means of flare lights from the other 
side. One hopes not. Meanwhile, after a glance 
round, the O.C. picks up his mud-caked leather 
mitts, settles the revolver pouch on his belt, 
blows out the guttering candle, feels his way out 
past the dripping waterproof sheet into the black 
trench, and leaves the dug-out to his sleeping 



The Dug-Out 77 

brother officer (who was on deck from 10 to I, 
and will be out again an hour before dawn) and 
the rats. 

"Theoretically, this O.C. Company may be 
himself as much in need of sleep as anyone in the 
trench. Actually, however, apart from his needs, 
he is personally responsible for whatever may 
happen in quite a long stretch of dark, mysterious 
trench: of trench which in one moment may be 
converted by the ingenious Boche into a raging 
hell of paralysing gas and smoke, of lurid flame 
and rending explosion. German officers seated 
in artillery dug-outs a mile or so away across the 
far side of No Man's Land may bring about that 
transformation in one moment. They did it less 
than a week ago, though, by reason of unceasing 
watchfulness on this side, it availed them nothing. 
They may be just about to do it now, and, unlike 
the average of German O.C. Companies, our 
officers never ask their men to face any kind of 
danger which they themselves do not face with 
them. And so, for this particular O.C. Company, 
the interior of that queer little dug-out (where the 
men's rum stands in jars under the lower bunk, 
and letters from home are scanned, maps pored 
over, and reports and returns made out) does not 



78 A •• Temporary Gentleman •• 

exactly bring unmixed repose. But the rats love 
it." 

So there you are! By the judicious picking of 
Taffy's brains I have been enabled to present you 
with a much better picture of a dug-out than 
my own unaided pen could give. Reading over, 
there seems something melancholy and sombre 
about it; I don't know why. It's a jolly little 
dug-out, and Taffy's a thundering fine officer; 
nothing in the least melancholy about him. 
Then why — ? Oh, well, I guess it's his Celtic 
blood. Maybe he's got a temperament. I must 
tell him so. By the way, that wiring job he men- 
tions came off all right; a nasty exposed place, 
but "the Peacemaker" got his party through 
without a single casualty, or, as the men always 
say, "Casua/ity." 

Taffy writes a much better letter, doesn't he? 
than your 

li Temporary Gentleman" 



A BOMBING SHOW 

Very many thanks for the parcel with the horse- 
hide mitts and the torch refills, both of which will 
be greatly appreciated. The mitts are the best 
things of the kind I've seen for trench work, and 
as for electric torches, I don't know what we 
should do without them. 

I've come below for a sleep, really. Taffy Mor- 
gan was very much off colour yesterday, and is 
far from fit to-day. I had to take his duty as well 
as my own last night, so came off pretty short in 
the matter of rest. But I must stop to tell you 
about the lark we had last night; the jolliest 
thing that's happened since we came in, and no 
end of a score for "A" Company. My batman 
tells me "B " are mad as hatters about it. 

Our signalling officer happened to be along the 
front yesterday afternoon with a brand-new 
telescope that someone had sent the CO., a very 
fine instrument. Signals wasn't interested in 
our bit of line, as it happens, but was dead nuts 

79 



80 A •' Temporary Gentleman ** 

on some new Boche machine-gun emplacement or 
other away on "B's" left. When he was coming 
back through our line I got him to lend me the 
new glass while he had some tea and wrote reports 
in our dug-out. Perhaps you think there's not 
much need of a telescope when the Boche line is 
less than a couple of hundred yards away. Well, 
now you'd hardly believe how difficult it is to make 
things out. At this time of the year the whole of 
this place is full of mist, for one thing. And then, 
you see, the ground in front is studded all over 
with barbed wire, stakes, long rank grass, things 
thrown out : here and there an old log, and, here 
and there, of course, a dead body. One has to 
look along the ground level, since to look from a 
higher level would mean exposure, and I can assure 
you it's surprisingly easy to miss things. I've 
wasted a good many rounds myself, firing at old 
rags or bits of wood, or an old cape in the grass 
among the Boche wire, feeling sure I'd got a 
sniper. The ground is pretty much torn up, too, 
you understand, by shells and stuff, and that 
makes it more difficult. 

Well, I was looking out from a little sheltered 
spot alongside the entrance to what we call Stink- 
ing Sap. It has rather a rottener smell than 



A Bombing Show 81 

most trenches, I think. And all of a sudden I 
twigged something that waked me right up. It 
was nothing much : just a shovel sticking up against 
a little mound. But it led to other things. A 
yard away from where this shovel lay the C.O.'s 
fine glass enabled me to make out a gap in the wet, 
misty grass. You may be sure I stared jolly 
hard, and presently the whole thing became clear 
to me. The Boches had run out a new sap to 
fully sixty yards from their fire trench, which at 
this particular point is rather far from ours: 
over 250 yards, I suppose. It was right opposite 
our own Stinking Sap, and I suppose the head of 
it was not more than 100 yards from the head of 
Stinking Sap. There was no Boche working there 
then; not a sign of any movement. I made sure 
of that. Then I got my compass and trench map, 
and took a very careful bearing. And then I 
toddled round to Company Headquarters and got 
hold of " the Peacemaker, " without letting Signals 
know anything about it. If the O.C. liked to 
let Battalion Headquarters know, that was his 
business. 

Of course, "the Peacemaker' ' was delighted. 
"It's perfectly clear they must have cut it last 
night," he said. "And as sure as God made little 



82 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

apples, they'll be going on with it to-night. Let's 
see, the moon rises about 945 . Splendid ! They'll 
get to work as soon. as it's dark." 

He was awfully decent about it, and agreed to 
let me go, since I'd had the luck to spot it. As a 
matter of fact, he did the more important spotting 
himself. He twigged what I'd overlooked: a 
whacking big shell-hole, shallow but wide, about 
fifteen or twenty feet to one side of their sap-head ; 
an absolutely ideal spot for cover, and no more 
than a hundred yards from the head of Stinking 
Sap. I decided to take Corporal Slade with me, 
because he's such a fine bomber, besides being as 
cool as a cucumber and an all-round good chap. 
You remember he was with me that time in Master 
Boche's trench. Somehow, the thing got round 
before tea-time, and the competition among the 
men was something awful. When Slade gave it 
out that I was taking all the men I wanted from 
No. 1 Platoon, there was actually a fight between 
one of my lot and a fellow named Ramsay, of 
No. 3 Platoon; a draper, I'll trouble you, and a 
pillar of his chapel at home. Then a deputation 
of the other Platoon Sergeants waited on "the 
Peacemaker," and in the end, to save bloodshed, 
I agreed to take Corporal Slade and one man 



A Bombing Show 83 

from my own Platoon, and one man from each of 
the other three Platoons. To call for volunteers 
for work over the parapet with our lot is perfectly 
hopeless. You must detail your men, or the whole 
blessed Company would swarm out over the sticks 
every time, especially if there's the slightest hint 
of raiding or bombing. 

"The Peacemaker's" idea was that we must 
reach that shell-hole from the end of Stinking 
Sap, if possible, before the Boche started work in 
his new sap, because once he started he'd be sure 
to have a particularly sharp look-out kept, and 
might very well have a covering party outside as 
well. Before it was dark my fellows were champ- 
ing their bits in Stinking Sap, fretting to be off. 
If one gave the beggars half a chance they'd be 
out in the open in broad daylight. But, of course, 
I kept 'em back. There was no reason why 
Boche should be in a violent hurry to start work, 
and I was most anxious he shouldn't suspect that 
we suspected anything. 

As it turned out, we were all lying in that shell- 
hole close to his new sap for three-quarters of an 
hour before a single Boche made a move. There 
was a fine rain all the time, and it was pitch dark. 
The only thing we didn't like was the fact that 



84 A •• Temporary Gentleman •• 

all the flares and parachute lights ever made seemed 
to be being sent up from the Boche line, right 
alongside this new sap. However, we lay per- 
fectly still and flat, hands covered and faces down, 
and as long as you do that all the flares in the 
world won't give you away much, in ground as 
full of oddments and unevenness as that is. 

By and by Slade gave a little tug at my jerkin. 
I listened hard, and just made out footsteps, 
probably in the Boche fire trench itself, near the 
entrance to their new sap. Two or three minutes 
later we began really to enjoy ourselves. As far 
as we could make out Fritz hadn't a notion that 
we were on to his game. Six or eight of 'em came 
shuffling along the sap, carrying picks and shovels, 
and jabbering and growling away nineteen to the 
dozen. We could hear every sound. One fel- 
low, anyhow, was smoking. We got the whiff of 
that. We could hear 'em spit, and, very nearly, 
we could hear them breathe. I did wish I knew 
a little more German than ' * Donnerwetter " and 
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" 

I could feel the man on my left (the draper from 
No. 3) quivering like a coursing greyhound in a 
leash, and had to whisper to him to wait for the 
word. But Corporal Slade on my right might 



A Bombing Show 85 

have been on the barrack square. I saw him use 
a match to pick his teeth while he listened. I'd 
rehearsed my fellows letter perfect in our own 
trench before we started, and when the Boches 
were fairly under way digging, I gave the signal 
with my left hand. There was a bomb in my 
right. Waiting for it as I was, I could distinctly 
hear the safety-pins come out of our six bombs, and 
could even hear the breathed murmur of the pug- 
nacious draper at my shoulder: 

"A hundred an' one, a hundred an' two, a 
hundred an' three!" (He was timing the fuse of 
his bomb, exactly as I'd told 'em.) 

And then we tore a big hole in the night. Our 
six bombs landed, one on the edge and the other 
five plumb in the sap-head before us, right in the 
middle of the six or eight Boches digging there. 
Two seconds after they left our hands they did 
their job. It was less than two seconds really. 
And when the rending row was done we heard 
only one Boche moaning, so I knew that at least 
six or seven were "gone West" for keeps, and 
would strafe no more Englishmen. 

Now the idea had been that directly our job was 
done we should bolt for the head of Stinking Sap. 
But, while we'd been lying there, it had occurred 



86 A ••Temporary Gentleman " 

to me that the Boches, knowing all about what 
distance bombs could be thrown, and that we 
must be lying in the open near their sap-head, 
ought to be able to sweep that ground with machine- 
gun fire before we could get to Stinking Sap, and 
that, having done that, they would surely send a 
whole lot more men down their new sap, to tackle 
what was left of us that way. Therefore I'd made 
each of my fellows carry four bombs in his pockets : 
twenty -four among the lot of us. And we'd only 
used six. Quite enough, too, for the Boches in 
that sap. Therefore, again, we now lay abso- 
lutely still, and just as close as wax, while Fritz 
rained parachute lights, stars, flares, and every 
kind of firework in the sky, and, just as I had 
fancied, swept his sap-head with at least a thou- 
sand rounds of machine-gun bullets, not one of 
which so much as grazed us, where we lay spread- 
eagled in the mud of that shell-hole. 

And then — dead silence. 

"Get your bombs ready, lads," I told my fel- 
lows. In another few seconds we heard the 
Boches streaming along their narrow new sap. 
They took it for granted we had cleared back to 
our line, and they made no attempt to disguise 
their coming. In fact, from the rate at which 



A Bombing Show 87 

they rushed along that narrow ditch I could al- 
most swear that some came without rifles or any- 
thing. We waited till the near end of the sap was 
full, and then: "A hundred and one," etc. We 
gave ■' em our second volley, and immediately on 
top of it our third. It must have been a regular 
shambles. Slade and I, by previous arrangement, 
lobbed ours over as far as ever we could to the left, 
landing quite near the beginning of the sap, and 
so getting the Boches who were only just leaving 
their own fire trench. Then I laid my hand on 
the draper to prevent his throwing, and Slade and 
the other three gave their last volley, and bolted 
full pelt for Stinking Sap 

There was no bucking at all in the part of the 
sap near us. The Boches there wouldn't trouble 
anyone any more, I fancy. But a few seconds 
after Slade disappeared, we heard a fresh lot 
start on their way down the sap from their fire 
trench. We gave 'em up to about "A hundred 
and three" and a half, and then we let 'em have 
our last two bombs, well to the left, and ourselves 
made tracks like greased lightning for Stinking 
Sap. The luck held perfectly, and Slade was 
hauling the draper in over the parapet of Stinking 
Sap before a sound came from the Boches' machine- 



88 A *' Temporary Gentleman" 

guns. And then, by Gad! they opened on us. 
They holed my oilskin coat for me, as I slid in 
after Ramsay, and' spoiled it. I've jotted it 
down against 'em and in due course they shall pay. 
But not one of my crowd got a scratch, and we 
reckon to have accounted for at the very least 
twenty Boches, maybe double that — a most 
splendid lark. 

What makes "B " Company rather mad is that, 
strictly speaking, this new Boche sap is a shade 
nearer their line than ours. The CO. came up 
to look at it this morning, on the strength of 
our O.C.'s morning situation report, and was 
most awfully nice to me about it. He said we did 
well to wait for the Boches' coming down from 
their line after our first scoop, and that plans must 
be made to fit circumstances, and not held to be 
ends in themselves, and all that kind of thing — 
initiative, you know, and so on — very nice indeed 
he was. And the best of it is our artillery has 
registered on that sap this morning, and this 
afternoon is just about going to blow it across the 
Rhine. So altogether "A" Company is feeling 
pretty good, if you please, and has its tail well 
up. So has your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 



OVER THE PARAPET 

We are back again in billets, but so close to the 
line this time that it's more like being in support 
trenches. That is to say, one hears all the firing, 
and knows just what is happening in the line all 
the time. Also, we do carrying fatigues in the 
trenches at night. Still, it's billets, and not bad. 
One can get a bath, and one can sleep dry. I 
must tell you about billets sometime. At the 
moment the letter from you lying in front of me 
contains clear orders. I am to tell you what 
patrolling is — quite a big order. 

Well, there are many different kinds of patrols, 
you know, but so far as we are concerned, here in 
trenches, they boil down to two sorts: observa- 
tion patrols and righting patrols, such as bombing 
and raiding parties. It's all night work, of course, 
since one cannot do anything over the parapet 
by day without getting shot; anything, that is, 
except a regular attack preceded by bombardment 
of the Boche lines. On the whole, I think it's 

89 



90 A "Temporary Gentleman** 

about the most interesting part of our work, and 
I think it's safe to say it's a part in which our 
fellows can run rings round the Boches. In 
masses (well primed with rum ; ether and oxygen, 
too, they say) the Boche can do great things. He 
will advance, as it were blindly, in the face of any 
kind of fire you like; even the kind that accounts 
for sixty or seventy per cent, of him in a hundred 
yards. But when he comes to act as an individual, 
or in little groups, as in patrolling — well, we don't 
think much of him. We think our worst is bet- 
ter than his best in all that sort of work. I'm 
perfectly certain that, man for man, the British 
and French troops are more formidable, harder 
to beat, better men all round, than the Boche. 

The first kind of patrol I mentioned — observa- 
tion — is part and parcel of our everyday routine 
in the firing line. This kind goes out every night, 
and often several times during the night, from 
every Company. Its main objective is observa- 
tion: to get any information it can about the 
doings of the Hun, and to guard our line against 
surprise moves of any sort. But, though that's 
its main object, it does not go unarmed, of course, 
and, naturally, will not refuse a scrap if the chance 
comes. But it differs from a bombing or raiding 



Over the Parapet 91 

patrol in that it does not go out for the purpose of 
fighting, and as a rule is not strong, numerically; 
usually not more than about half a dozen in the 
party. In some Companies observation patrols 
are often sent out under a good N.C.O. and no 
officer. We make a point of sending an officer 
always; not that we can't trust our N.C.O. 's; 
they're all right; but we talked it over, and de- 
cided we would rather one of us always went. 
As I said, it's interesting work, and work with 
possibilities of distinction in it, and we're all pretty 
keen on it. Every Company in the Battalion is. 
(Boche patrols, one gathers, hardly ever include 
an officer.) 

With us, it is decided during the afternoon just 
what we are going to do that night in the patrol 
line, and the officer whose turn it is chooses his 
own men and N.C.O. 's. And within limits, you 
know, "the Peacemaker" lets us work out our 
own plans pretty much as we like, providing there's 
no special thing he wants done. It often happens, 
you see, that during daylight the sentries or the 
officer on duty have been able to make out with 
glasses some signs of work being done at night 
by the Boche, in his front line, or in a sap or a 
communication trench. Then that night it will 



92 A •* Temporary Gentleman** 

be the job of the patrols to investigate that part 
of the opposite line very carefully. Perhaps half 
a dozen Boches will be found working somewhere 
where our patrol can wipe 'em out by lobbing a 
few bombs among 'em. That's a bit of real jam 
for the patrol. Or, again, they may observe 
something quite big: fifty to a hundred Boches 
carrying material and building an emplacement, 
or something of that kind. Then it will be worth 
while to get back quickly, having got an exact 
bearing on the spot, and warn the O.C. Company. 
He may choose to turn a couple of machine-guns 
loose suddenly on that spot, or he may find it 
better to telephone to Battalion Headquarters 
and let them know about it, so that, if they like, 
they can get our "heavies" turned on, and liven 
the Boche job up with a good shower of H.E., 
to smash the work, after a few rounds of shrap. 
to lay out the workers. 

Then, again r if you all keep your eyes jolly 
well skinned, there's a sporting chance of getting 
another kind of luck. You may spot a Boche 
patrol while you're crawling about in No Man's 
Land. "B" Company had the luck to do that 
three nights ago, and our fellows are so envious 
now they all want to be patrolling at once; it's 



Over the Parapet 93 

as much as one can do to keep them in the trench. 
They're simply aching to catch a Boche patrol 
out, and put the wind up "B." You see "B" 
lost two out of a Boche patrol of six; killing three 
and taking one prisoner. "A" can't say anything 
about it, of course, because we've not had the 
luck yet to see a Boche patrol. But God help its 
members when we do, for I assure you our fellows 
would rather die half a dozen times over than fail 
to wipe "B's" eye. It's the way they happen to 
be built. They don't wish the Boche any parti- 
cular harm, but if they can get within sight of a 
Boche patrol, that patrol has just got to be scup- 
pered without any possible chance of a couple 
getting clear. The performance of "B" has just 
got to be beaten, and soon. 

Honestly, it isn't easy to hold these chaps back. 
The observation patrol I was out with the night 
before we came out of the trenches really needed 
holding. There were no Boche patrols for them 
to scupper, and just to humour the beggars I kept 
'em out nearly an hour longer than I had any right 
to; and then, if you'll believe me, they were so 
disappointed at having to head back with nothing 
in the bag, so to say, that the Corporal was de- 
puted to beg my permission for a little raid on the 



94 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

Huns' front trench. And there were just five of 
us, all told; our only weapons knobkerries and 
two bombs each, and my revolver and dagger. 

By the way, the survivor of the Hun patrol that 
"B" rounded up was not the first prisoner taken 
by the Battalion. No ; we had that honour nearly 
a week ago. A queer episode that, on our second 
night in. There was a bit of line on our extreme 
right which was neither for use nor ornament; a 
horrible place. It had been all blown in by trench 
mortars and oil-cans, and hardly had a strand of 
unbroken wire in front of it. (You may be sure 
it's in different shape now. We worked at it for 
two nights in succession, and made a good job 
of it.) Well, it was so bad for fifty yards or so 
that sentries could not occupy it properly; no 
fire-step left, and no cover worth speaking of. 
Taffy Morgan was nosing about in front of this 
bit just after dark, out beyond where the wire had 
been, marking places for new entanglements, 
when he spotted a big Boche patrol making slowly 
up that way from their front. They were fifteen 
or twenty strong. 

Taffy lay very low, and crawled back into our 
line without being seen. Then he raced down the 
trench for his pet machine-gun — a Lewis, you know 



Over the Parapet 95 

— and got it along there with a Corporal and a 
couple of machine-gunners in rather less than no 
time. By then the messenger he had sent off 
had got back with "the Peacemaker" and myself 
and the Sergeant-Major. We all kept as quiet 
as mice till we were able to make out the move- 
ment of the Boche patrol. We let them get fairly 
close — thirty or forty yards — and then let blaze 
at 'em, firing just as low as we could. 

I suppose we gave 'em about four hundred 
rounds! We heard a bit of moaning after "the 
Peacemaker" gave the word to cease fire, and then, 
to our amazement, a Hun talking, apparently to 
another Boche, telling him to come on, and call- 
ing him some kind of a bad hat. I tell you, it 
was queer to listen to. The Boche who was doing 
the talking appeared to have worked a good bit 
down to the left of the bunch we had fired at, 
and had evidently got into our wire. We could 
hear him floundering among the tin cans. 

"Don't fire," said "the Peacemaker." "We'll 
maybe get this chap alive." And, sure enough, 
the Boche began singing out to us now, asking 
first of all whether we were Prussian, and then 
trying a few phrases in French, including a con- 
tinuously repeated: "Je suis fatigue!" 



96 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

Most extraordinary it was. ' ' The Peacemaker' ' 
couldn't tell him we were Prussian, but he kept 
inviting the fellow to come in, and telling him we 
wouldn't hurt him. Finally I took a man out 
and lugged the chap in out of the wire myself. 
We got tired of his floundering, and I guess he 
must have been tired of it too, for he was pretty 
badly cut by it. He had no rifle; nothing but a 
dagger; and the moment I got him into our trench 
he began catting all over the place; most deadly 
sick he was. 

We led him off down the trench to the S.M.'s 
dug-out and gave him a drink of tea, and washed 
the wire cuts on his face and hands. He was a 
poor starveling-looking kind of a chap; a bank 
clerk from Heidelberg, as it turned out afterwards, 
and a Corporal. He told us he'd had nothing 
but rum, but we thought him under the influence 
of some drug; some more potent form of Dutch 
courage, such as the Huns use before leaving 
their trenches. Our M.O. told us afterwards he 
was very poorly nourished. We blindfolded him 
and took him down to Battalion Headquarters, 
and from there he would be sent on to the Brigade. 
We never knew if they got any useful informa- 
tion out of him; but he was the Battalion's first 



Over the Parapet 97 

prisoner. The other Boches we got in that night 
were dead. That burst of M.G. fire had laid them 
out pretty thoroughly, nine of 'em; and a small 
patrol we kept out there wounded three or: four 
more who came much later — I suppose to look 
for their own wounded. 

There's a creepy kind of excitement about 
patrol work which makes it fascinating. If there's 
any light at all, you never know who's drawing 
a bead on you. If there's no light, you never 
know what you're going to bump into at the next 
step. It's very largely hands-and-knees' work, 
and our chaps just revel in it. My first, as you 
know, landed me in the Boche trenches; and 
that's by no means a very uncommon thing either, 
though it ought never to happen if you have a 
good luminous-faced compass and the sense to 
refer to it often enough. My second patrol was 
a bit more successful. I'll tell you about that 
next time. Meanwhile, I hope what I've said 
will make you fancy you know roughly what 
patrol work is, though, to be sure, I feel I haven't 
given you the real thing the way Taffy could if 
he set out to write about it. He could write it 
almost better perhaps than he could do it. He's 
a wee bit too jerky and impulsive, too much strung 



98 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

up rather, for patrol work. My thick-headed 
sort of plodding is all right on patrol; suits the 
men first-rate. I suppose it kind of checks the 
excitement and keeps it within bounds. But you 
mark my words, our fellows will get a Boche patrol 
before long, and when they do I'll wager they 
won't lose any of 'em. 

We're going to play a team of "B" Company 
at football to-morrow afternoon, if the Boche 
doesn't happen to be running an artillery strafe. 
We play alongside the cemetery, and for some 
unknown reason the Boche gunners seem to be 
everlastingly ranging on it, as though they wanted 
to keep our dead from resting. We're all as fit 
and jolly as can be, especially your 

" Temporary Gentleman." 



THE NIGHT PATROL 

Here in billets the amount of letter- writing 
the men do is something appalling — for the officers 
who have to censor their letters. As you know, 
our training in England included some time in 
four different parts of the country, and our fel- 
lows have sweethearts in each place. And they 
seem to get parcels from most of 'em, too. Then 
there are the home letters. They all describe 
their writers as being "in the pink," and getting 
on "champion," as, I believe, I told you before. 

My billet — or, rather, our billet, for all "A" 
Company officers are under the one roof here — is 
in the church house, and there's a candlestick 
three feet high in the bedroom I share with Taffy. 
There's no glass in the windows, and the roof at 
one end has had a shell through it, and so the 
room gets a bit swampy. Otherwise, the place is 
all right. Our own batteries near by shake it up 
at times, and the shell-holes, in the road outside 
show it's had some very narrow squeaks; but 

99 



ioo A "Temporary Gentleman** 

neither it nor the church has suffered very much, 
though they stand well up on a hill, less than half 
a mile from our support line of trenches, which 
the Battalion billeted here mans in event of alarm 
— gas attack, you know, or anything of that sort. 
So while we're here we sleep fully equipped at 
night. But in our next week out, at the village 
farther back, we are more luxurious, and undress 
of a night. 

But I promised to tell you about that second 
patrol of mine. We were greatly interested in 
some kind of an erection we could see just behind 
the Boche front line on our left. All we could 
see was sand-bags; but, somehow, it looked too 
big and massive for a mere machine-gun emplace- 
ment, and we were all most anxious to find out 
what it could be. So "the Peacemaker" agreed 
that I should take a patrol that night and try to 
investigate. This was the first patrol we sent out 
as a Company in the line on our own. My first 
was when we were in with another Company for 
instruction, you know, and they apparently had 
not noticed this sand-bag structure. At all 
events, they made no report to "the Peacemaker" 
about it when we took over. 

The moon was not due to rise till about eleven 



The Night Patrol 101 

that night, so I decided to go out at nine. The 
Company Sergeant-Ma j or asked if he could come, 
so I arranged to take him and one Platoon scout 
from each Platoon. They had none of them been 
out as yet, and we wanted them to have practice. 
Getting out into No Man's Land marks a distinct 
epoch in a man's training for trench warfare, you 
know. If it happens that he has some consider- 
able time in trenches without ever going over the 
parapet, he's apt to be jumpy when he does get 
out. I fancy that must be one reason why the 
Boches make such a poor show in the matter of 
individual effort of an aggressive sort. They're 
so trench-bound that their men seem no use out 
of trenches, except in massed formation. 

Don't make any mistake about it; there's 
some excuse for a man being jumpy over the 
parapet when he's never had a chance of getting 
accustomed to it. That's why I think our O.C. 
is very wise in the way he tries to give all the men 
a turn at work over the parapet, wiring, patrolling, 
improving saps, and what not: because it's a 
pretty eerie business until you get used to it. 
Behind our line you have graves and crosses, and 
comparatively friendly things of all kinds — rub- 
bish, you know, and oddments discarded by fellow 



102 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

humans no longer ago than a matter of hours. 
But out in No Man's Land, of course, the domi- 
nant factor is the' swift, death-dealing bullet, 
and the endless mass of barbed-wire entangle- 
ments which divides Boches from Britons and 
Frenchmen for so many hundreds of miles. There 
are plenty of dead things out there, but, barring 
the rats, when you get any other movement in 
No Man's Land you may reckon it's enemy 
movement : creeping men with bombs and daggers, 
who may have been stalking you or may not have 
seen you. But it wouldn't do to reckon much 
on anyone's not having seen you, because if 
there's one place in the world in which every 
man's ears and eyes are apt to be jolly well open 
it's out there in the slimy darkness of No Man's 
Land. 

You may very well chance to stick your hand 
in the upturned face of a far-gone corpse, as I 
did my first time out; but if you do so you 
mustn't shiver — far less grunt — because shivering 
may make your oilskin coat or something else 
rustle, and draw fire on you and your party. So 
a man needs to have his wits about him when he's 
over the parapet, and the cooler he keeps and the 
more deliberate are his movements the better for 



The Night Patrol 103 

all concerned. One needn't loaf, but, on the 
other hand, it's rather fatal to hurry, and quite 
fatal to flurry, especially when you're crawling 
among wire with loose strands of it and "giant 
gooseberries" of the prickly stuff lying round in 
all directions on the ground to catch your hands 
and knees and hold you up. If you lose your 
head or do anything to attract attention, your 
number's pretty well up. But, on the other 
hand, if you keep perfectly cool and steady, mak- 
ing no sound whatever happens, and lying per- 
fectly flat and still while Boche flares are up or 
their machine-guns are trying to locate you, it's 
surprising how very difficult it is for the Hun to 
get you, and what an excellent chance you have 
of returning to your own line with a whole skin. 

I had an exact compass bearing on the spot we 
wanted to investigate, taken from the sap on our 
left from which we were starting. "The Peace- 
maker" ran his own hands over the men of the 
party before we climbed out, to make sure every- 
one had remembered to leave all papers and things 
of that sort behind. (One goes pretty well stripped 
for these jobs, to avoid anything useful falling 
perchance into Boche hands.) We each carried 
a couple of bombs, the men had knobkerries, and 



104 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

I had revolver and dagger, to be on the safe side. 
But we were out for information, not scrapping. 

It was beautifully dark, and, starting from a 
sap-head, clear of our own wire, we crossed the 
open very quickly, hardly so much as stooping, 
till we were close to the Boche wire, when a 
burst of machine-gun fire from them sent us to 
ground. The Companies on each flank in our 
line had been warned we were out. This is 
always done to prevent our own men firing at 
us. Such little fire as was coming from our 
line was high, and destined for the Boche 
support lines and communications; nothing to 
hurt us. 

Now, when we began crawling through the 
Boche wire I made the sort of mistake one does 
make until experience teaches. I occupied myself 
far too much with what was under my nose, and 
too little with what lay ahead — and too little 
with my compass. To be sure, there's a good deal 
in the Boche wire which rather forces itself upon 
the attention of a man creeping through it on 
hands and knees. The gooseberries and loose 
strands are the devil. Still, it is essential to keep 
an eye on the compass, and to look ahead, as well 
as on the ground under one's nose, lest you over- 



Th« Night Patrol 105 

shoot your mark or drop off diagonally to one side 
or the other of it. I know a good deal better now. 
But one has no business to make even one mis- 
take, if one's a "Temporary Officer and Gentle- 
man," because one's men have been taught to 
follow and trust one absolutely, and it's hardly 
ever only one's own safety that's at stake. 

Suddenly I ran my face against the side of 
a "giant gooseberry" with peculiarly virulent 
prongs,, and in that moment a bullet whizzed low 
over my head, and — here's the point — the bolt 
of the rifle from which that bullet came was pulled 
back and jammed home for the next shot — as it 
seemed right in my ear. We all lay perfectly flat 
and still. I could feel the Sergeant-Major's 
elbow just touching my left hip. Very slowly 
and quietly I raised my head enough to look round 
the side of that "giant gooseberry," and instinct 
made me look over my right shoulder. 

We were less than ten paces from the Boche 
parapet. The great, jagged black parados, like 
a mountain range on a theatre drop scene, hung 
right over my shoulder against a sky which seemed 
now to have a most deadly amount of light in it. 
I was lying almost in a line with it, instead of at 
right angles to it. Just then, the sentry who had 



106 A "Temporary Gentleman " 

fired gave a little cough to clear his throat. It 
seemed he was actually with us. Then he fired 
again. I wondered if he had a bead on the back 
of my head. He was not directly opposite us, 
but a dozen paces or so along the line. 

Now, by the queer twisty feeling that went 
down my spine when my eyes first lighted on that 
grim black line of parados just over my shoulder, 
I guessed how my men might be feeling. "Little 
blame to them if they show some panic," thinks 
I. I turned my face left, so as to look down 
at the Sergeant-Major's over my left shoulder. 
He'd seen that towering parados against the sky, 
and heard that sentry's cough and the jamming 
home of his rifle bolt. By twisting my head I 
brought my face close to the S.M.'s, and could 
see that he fancied himself looking right into his 
own end. I had to think quick. I know that 
man's mind like the palm of my hand, and I 
now know his splendid type : the English ex-N.C.O. 
of Marines, with later service in the Metropolitan 
Police — a magnificent blend. I also know the 
wonderful strength of his influence over the men, 
to whom he is experienced military professional- 
ism, expertness incarnate. At present he felt we 
had come upon disaster. 



The Night Patrol 107 

"My Gawd, sir!" he breathed at me. "Why, 
we're on top of 'em!" 

That was where I thought quick, and did a 
broad grin as I whispered to him: "Pretty good 
for a- start — a damn fine place, Sergeant-Major. 
But we'll manage to get a bit nearer before we 
leave 'em, won't we?" 

It worked like a charm, and I thanked God for 
the fine type he represents. It was as though his 
mind was all lighted up, and I could see the thoughts 
at work in it. "Oh, come! so it's all right, after 
all. My officer's quite pleased. He knew all 
about it and it's just what he wanted; so that's 
all right." These were the thoughts. And from 
that moment the S.M. began to regard the whole 
thing as a rather creditable lark, though the pit 
of his stomach had felt queer, as well it might, for 
a moment. And the wonderful thing was — there 
must be something in telepathy, you know — 
that this change seemed to communicate itself 
almost instantly to the men — bless their simple 
souls! — crouched round about behind. I'd no 
time to think of the grimness of it, after that. A 
kind of heat seemed to spread all over me from 
inside, and I had been cold. I think a mother 
must feel like that when danger threatens her 



108 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

kiddies. The thought in my mind was: "I've 
brought these fellows here in carelessness. I'll 
get 'em back with whole skins or I'll die at it." 

I never had any Hymn of Hate feeling in my 
life, but I think I'd have torn half a dozen Boches 
in pieces with my hands before I'd have let 'em 
get at any of those chaps of mine that night. 

Now I was free; I knew the men were all right. 
I whispered to the S.M., and very slowly and 
silently we began to back away from that grim 
parados. The sentry must have been half asleep, 
I fancy. My compass showed me we must be 
forty or fifty yards left of the point in the Boche 
line we wanted ; so as soon as we were far enough 
back we worked slowly up right, and then a bit 
in again. And then we found all we'd hoped for. 
It was a regular redoubt the Boche was building, 
and he had nearly a hundred men at work, in- 
cluding the long string we saw carrying planks 
and posts. Some were just sitting round smoking. 
We could hear every word spoken, almost every 
breath. And we could see there were sixty or 
seventy men immediately round the redoubt. 

That was good enough for me. All I wanted 
now was to get my men back safely. I knew 
"the Peacemaker" had two machine-guns trained 



The Night Patrol 109 

precisely on the redoubt. All I wanted was to 
make sure their fire was all a shade to the left, 
and every bullet would tell. We should be firing 
fairly into the brown of 'em; because the little 
cross communication trench which we had watched 
them working in was no more than waist-deep; 
just a short-cut for convenience in night work 
only. We had 'em absolutely cold. The S.M. 
told me the men wanted to bomb 'em from where 
we were. But that was not my game at all. 

With the compass bearing I had, getting back 
was simple. I saw the last man into our sap, and 
found the O.C. waiting there for me. I'd no 
sooner given him my news than he was at the 
guns. We had twenty or thirty rifles levelled on 
the same mark, too, and, at "the Peacemaker's" 
signal, they all spoke at once. Gad! it was fine 
to see the fire spouting from the M.G.'s mouth, 
and to know how its thunder must be telling. 

Four belts we gave 'em altogether, and then 
whipped the guns down into cover, just as the 
Boche machine-guns began to answer from all 
along their line. It was a "great do," as the 
S.M. said. The men were wildly delighted. 
They had seen the target; lain and watched it, 
under orders not to make a sound. And now 



no A •• Temporary Gentleman ** 

the pressure was off. Listening now, the Boche 
guns having ceased fire, our sentries could plainly 
hear groaning and moaning opposite, and see the 
lights reflected on the Boche parados moving to 
and fro as their stretcher-bearers went about 
their work. A "great do," indeed. And so 
says your 

" Temporary Gentleman." 



IN BILLETS 

You have asked me once or twice about billets, 
and I ought to have told you more about them 
before; only there seems such a lot to pick and 
choose from that when I do sit down to write I 
seldom get on to the particular story I mean to 
tell. 

And that reminds me, I didn't tell you of the 
odd thing that happened the night we came out 
into billets this time. The Boche had finished 
his customary evening Hymn of Hate, or we 
thought he had, and while the men were filing 
into their different billets the C.S.M. proceeded 
to post our Company guard outside Company 
Headquarters. He had just given the sentry 
his instructions and turned away, when Boche 
broke out in a fresh place — their battery com- 
mander's evening sauerkraut had disagreed with 
him, or something — and half a dozen shells came 
whistling over the village in quick succession. 

One landed in the roadway, a yard and a half 

in 



ii2 A "Temporary Gentleman** 

in front of the newly-posted sentry. Had it been 
a sound shell, it would have "sent him West"; 
but it proved a dud, and merely dug itself a neat 
hole in the macadam and lay there like a little 
man, having first sent a spray of mud and a few 
bits of flint spurting over our sentry and rattling 
against his box. 

Now that sentry happened to be our friend 
Tommy Dodd; and Tommy was about tired out. 
He'd been on a wiring party over the parapet 
three parts of the night, taken his turn of sentry- 
go in the other part; and all day long had been 
digging and mud-scooping, like the little hero he 
is, to finish repairing an impassable bit of trench 
that master Boche had blown in the evening be- 
fore, to make it safe before we handed over to the 
Company relieving. He was literally caked in 
clay from head to foot; eyebrows, moustache, 
and all; he hadn't a dry stitch on him, and, of 
course, had not had his supper. It was an over- 
sight that he should have been detailed for first 
sentry-go on our arrival in billets. I had noticed 
him marching up from the trenches; he could 
hardly drag one foot after another. What do 
you think the shell landing at his feet and 
showering mud on him extorted from weary 



In Billets 113 

Tommy Dodd? I was standing alongside at the 
time. 

'"Ere, not so much of it, Mister Boche! You 
take it from me an' be a bit more careful like. 
Silly blighter! Wotjer playin' at? Didn't yer 
know I was on sentry? Chuckin' yer silly shells 
about like that! If yer ain't more careful you'll 
be dirty'n me nice clean uniform nex', an' gettin' 
me paraded over for bein' dirty on sentry-go!" 

It's a pretty good spirit, isn't it? And I can 
assure you it runs right through; warranted fast 
colour; and as for standing the wash — well, 
Tommy Dodd had been up to his middle in muddy 
water most of the day. The Kaiser may have a 
pretty big military organisation, but, believe me, 
Germany and Austria together don't contain 
anything strong enough to dull, let alone break 
the spirit of the men of the New Army. The 
Army's new enough; but the tradition and the 
spirit are from the same old bin. It isn't altered; 
and there's nothing better; not anywhere in the 
world. 

And I'm supposed to be telling you about billets! 

Well, I told you before, how we took over from 
another Company; and the same holds good of 
how the other Company takes over from us in the 



ii4 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

trenches; and when it's over our fellows file out 
down the long communication trench, by platoons, 
with a goodish interval between men, so as to 
minimise the effect of chance bullets and shells; 
every man carrying all his own mud-caked goods 
and chattels, and all in good spirits at the prospects 
of a little change. Nothing Tommy welcomes so 
much as change — unless it's the chance of a 
scrap. 

We cannot very well form up and march pro- 
perly directly we get out of trenches at Ambulance 
Corner, because Fritz is so fond of directing his 
field-gun practice there ; so we rather straggle over 
the next quarter of a mile, by platoons, till we 
come to the little river. It's a jolly little stream, 
with a regular mill-race of a current, and a nice 
clear shallow reach close to the bridge, with clean 
grass alongside. We wade right in and wash 
boots. Everyone is wearing "boots, trench, gum, 
thigh," so he just steps into the river and washes 
the mud off. Then he gets back to the bank, and 
off with the gum-boots and on with the ordinary 
marching boots, which have been carried slung 
round the neck by their laces. The trench boots, 
clean and shiny now, are handed into store at 
Brigade Headquarters, ready for our next turn 



In Billets 115 

in, for anyone else who wants 'em. In store, 
they are hung up to dry, you know, for, though 
no wet from outside will ever leak into these 
boots (unless they're cut), yet, being water- and 
air-tight, they get pretty wet inside after a week's 
turn in trenches, from condensation and the 
moisture of one's own limbs which has no chance 
of evaporation. It's the same with the much- 
vaunted trench-coats, of course; a few hours' 
wear makes 'em pretty damp inside. 

After handing in the boots, we form up properly 
for marching into the village. Our Company 
Quartermaster-Sergeant, with a N.C.O. from each 
platoon, has been ahead a few hours before us, 
to take over billets from the Q.M.S. of the Com- 
pany that relieved us; and so each platoon has a 
guide to meet it, just as in taking over a line of 
trenches. Either in or close to every billet, there 
are cellars marked up outside for so many men. 
These are our bolt-holes, to which every man is 
instructed to run and take shelter the instant a 
bombardment begins. "Abri 50 hommes"; or 
" Cellar for 30 men"; these are the legends you 
see daubed outside the cellars. And chalked on 
the gates of the house-yards throughout the village 
you will see such lines as "30 Men, 'A' Coy."; 



n6 A ••Temporary Gentleman** 

or "2 Off.'s, 30 Men, 'B' Coy."; and, perhaps, 
the initials of the regiment. 

But when I mention billets you mustn't think 
of the style in which you billeted those four 
recruits last spring, you know. By Jove, no! 
It is laid down that billets in France mean the 
provision of shelter from the elements. Sometimes 
it's complete shelter, and sometimes it isn't; 
but it's always the best the folk can give. In 
this village, for instance, there are hardly any 
inhabitants left. Ninety per cent, of the houses 
are empty, and a good many have been pretty 
badly knocked about by shells. I have often 
laughed in remembering your careful anxiety 
about providing ash-trays and comfortable chairs 
for your recruits last year; and the trouble you 
took about cocoa last thing at night, and having 
the evening meal really hot, even though the 
times of arrival with your lodgers might be a bit 
irregular. It's not quite like that behind the firing 
line, you know. 

In some places the men's billets are all barns, 
granaries, sheds and stables, cow-houses, and the 
like. Here, they are nearly all rooms in empty 
houses. As for their condition, that, like our 
cocoa of a night, and cooking generally, is our own 



In Billets 117 

affair. In our Division, discipline is very strict 
about billets. They are carefully inspected once 
or twice during each turnout by the Commanding 
Officer, and every day by the O.C. Company and 
the Platoon Commanders. We have no brooms, 
brushes, or dusters, except what we can make. 
But the billets have to be very carefully cleaned 
out twice a day, and there must be no dirt or 
crumbs or dust about when they are inspected. 
Even the mire of the yards outside has to be 
scraped and cleared away, and kept clear; and 
any kind of destruction, like breaking down doors 
or anything of that sort, is a serious crime, to 
be dealt with very severely. The men thoroughly 
understand all this now, and the reason of it; 
and they are awfully good. They leave every 
place cleaner and better than they found it. 

In the same way it has been strictly laid down 
that in their attitude towards the inhabitants the 
men must be scrupulous. And, by Jove, they 
are ! Wherever our troops are you will find men 
in khaki helping the women with their washing, 
drawing water, feeding stock, bringing in cows, 
getting in wood, and all such matters; and if our 
fellows haven't much French, I can assure you 
they are chattering in some sort of a language 



n8 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

most of the time. And if all this is incomprehen- 
sible to the good Frenchwomen, how is it that the 
latter respond with so lively a chatter, and why 
are they always smiling and laughing the while 
— even when one sees that in their eyes which 
tells more plainly than the mourning they wear 
of sacrifices they have made in the service of 
France? Come to think of it, do you know, that 
sums up the attitude of all the French women I 
have met, and of the old men of France, too; 
and it's an attitude which compels respect, while 
it elicits sympathy. They smile with their lips, 
and in the brave hearts of them they smile, too; 
even though they cannot altogether hide either 
the wearing anxiety of waiting, or, where bereave- 
ment has come, the grief of mourning for brave 
men lost, which shows in their eyes. 

In the first convenient archway handy to our 
billets you will find the Company's field cooker. 
You have seen them trailing across the Plain down 
Salisbury way on field days — the same old cook- 
ers. The rations come there each day, from the 
Battalion Q.M. store, three miles away; and 
there the men draw them in their cooked form at 
meal- times. In every village there is a canteen 
where men buy stuff like chocolate, condensed 



In Billets 119 

milk, tinned cafe-au-lait, biscuits, cake, and so 
forth. 

In the day-time, when there are no carrying 
fatigues, we have frequent inspections, and once 
the first day out of trenches is past, every man's 
equipment has to be just so, and himself clean- 
shaven and smart. We have a bath-house down 
near the river, where everyone soaks in huge 
tubs of hot water; and in the yard of every 
billet you will find socks, shirts, and the like 
hanging out to dry after washing. By 8.30 at 
night all men not engaged in carrying fatigues 
have turned in. During the week out of trenches 
we get all the sleep we can. There are football 
matches most afternoons, and sing-songs in' the 
early evenings. And all and every one of these 
things are subject to one other thing — strafe; 
which, according to its nature, may send us to our 
cellars, or to the manning of support trenches and 
bridge-head defences. 

With regard to the officers, our batmen cook our 
grub, moderately well or atrociously badly, ac- 
cording to their capacity. But, gradually, they 
are all acquiring the soldierly faculty of knocking 
together a decent meal out of any rough elements 
of food there may be available. More often than 



120 A " Temporary Gentleman" 

not we do quite well. Our days are pretty much 
filled up in looking after the men, and in the 
evenings, after supper, we have their letters to 
censor, our own to write, if we are energetic 
enough, and a yarn and a smoke round whatever 
fire there may be before turning in; after which 
the Boche artillery is powerless to keep us awake. 
At this present moment I doubt whether there's 
another soul in "A" Company, besides myself, 
who's awake, except the sentry outside head- 
quarters. And I shall be asleep in about as 
long as it takes me to sign myself your 

" Temporary Gentleman" 



BOMBARDMENT 

The day before we came back into trenches I 
meant to have written you, but the chance didn't 
arise. Now we have been in just twenty-four 
hours, arid though the time has gone like lightning, 
because one has been on the jump all the while, 
yet, looking back, it seems ever so long since we 
were in billets. A good deal has happened. 

For the first time since we've been out here we 
took over in broad daylight yesterday afternoon, 
and I've never known Fritz so quiet as he was. 
Not only were there no shells, but very few bullets 
were flying while we were taking over, and the 

s were clearing out for their week in billets. 

We had everything in apple-pie order and the 
night's duties mapped out, stores checked, and 
ammunition dished out — the extra night supply 
I mean — before tea, and were just thinking how 
remarkably well-behaved the Boche was and 
what a great improvement it was to take over 
by daylight. And then the band played! 

121 



122 A "Temporary Gentleman** 

I had been counting the supply of bombs in the 
Company grenade store, and was in the act of 
setting my watch by Taffy's, standing there in the 
trench at a quarter to five, when, with a roar, 
shells landed in six different parts of our line; not 
in the trench, you know, but somewhere mighty 
close handy. Of course, you might say there 
was nothing very startling about half a dozen 
shells landing near us, especially as nobody was 
hit. And that's true. But there was something 
queer about it, all the same. We both felt it. 
Taffy looked at me, and I looked at him, and 
"Oho!" said Taffy. And I entirely agreed. 

Perhaps it was partly the unusual quietness that 
had come before. Anyhow, we both started at 
the double for Company Headquarters, and I 
know we both had the same idea — to see whether 
"the Peacemaker" wanted the word passed for 
everyone to take cover in such artillery shelters 
as we have now in this sector; and, mind you, 
they're miles better than they were when we first 
took over. 

But, bless your heart! we needn't have bothered 
getting word about it from the O.C. Before we 
got near the Company dug-out the men were 
seeing to that for themselves, as they have been 



Bombardment 123 

taught to do, and the trenches were empty except, 
of course, for the sentries and their reliefs, who, 
with the observation officer, would remain at their 
posts even if the bottom fell out of the world. 

Such a raging frenzy of fire as there was when 
we met "the Peacemaker," outside the signallers' 
cabin, you never could imagine in your life, not if I 
wrote about it all night. One knows now that, on 
the average, there were not more than ninety pro- 
jectiles per minute coming over us. But at the 
time, I assure you, it seemed there must be about 
ten a second, and that shells must be literally 
jostling each other in the air. Apart from any- 
thing else, the air was full of falling earth, wood, 
and barbed wire. It was clear they had begun by 
ranging on our parapet and entanglements. The 
oddest things were falling apparently from the 
sky — bits of trench boots, bully beef tins, shovel 
handles, stakes six feet long, lengths of wire, 
crumpled sheets of iron, and all kinds of stuff. 

I yelled to the O.C. that I would take observa- 
tion duty, and Taffy wanted to take it with me. 
But "the Peacemaker" very properly insisted on 
his going to ground. We had to shout right in 
each other's ears. The O.C. told me our telephone 
wires were cut to ribbons already. "But Head- 



124 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

quarters will know as much about this as we could 
tell 'em by now, " he yelled. But he had sent off 
a chit by runner, just to let the CO. know that 
our fellows had all taken cover, and that the 
heavy stuff seemed to be mostly landing on our 
front and the communication trenches immedi- 
ately in rear. The O.C. made a cup of his hands 
and shouted in my ear as we crouched in the 
bottom of the trench: 

"What you've got to do is to watch for the 
lifting of the curtain to our rear. Must have 
every man on the fire-step then. They must 
surely mean to come across after this." 

"I hope so. 'A' Company '11 eat 'em if they 
do." 

"That's if we can keep cover now without too 
many casualties. Keep as good a look-out as you 
can. You'll find me here, by the signallers." 

So I left him, and made my way along to a little 
observing shelter we had made near the centre of 
our bit of firing line. But, when I got there, I 
found that shelter was just a heap of yeasty mud 
and rubbish. Fritz was pounding that bit out of 
all recognition. By this time, you know, one could 
hardly see six paces ahead anywhere. The smoke 
hung low, so that every shell in bursting made 



Bombardment 125 

long sheets of red flame along the smoke. And 
just then I got my first whiff of gas in the smoke : 
not a gas cloud, you know, but the burst of gas 
shells: lachrymatory shells some of 'em were. So 
I went hurrying along the line then, ordering all 
gas helmets on. I found most of the men had 
seen to this without being told. 

By the way, I ought to say that, so far as I can 
tell, bombardment doesn't affect one's mind much. 
You don't feel the slightest bit afraid. Only a lot 
more alert than usual, and rather keyed up, as you 
might be if you were listening to a fine orchestra 
playing something very stirring. It's rather a 
pleasant feeling, like the exhilaration you get from 
drinking champagne, or hearing a great speech 
on some big occasion when there are thousands of 
people listening and all pretty well worked up. 
As I scrambled along the fire trench I laughed once, 
because I found I was talking away nineteen to 
the dozen. I listened, as though it were to some- 
one else, and I heard myself saying : 

"Let her rip! Let her rip, you blighters! You 
can't smash us, you sauer-krauters. You're only 
wasting the ammunition you'll be praying for pre- 
sently. Wait till our heavies get to work on you, 
you beauties. You'll wish you hadn't spoken. 



126 A "Temporary Gentleman ** 

Let her rip! Another dud! That was a rotten 
one. Why, you haven't got the range right even 
now, you rotters!" 

Wasn't it queer, jawing away like that, while 
they were hammering the stuffing out of our line? 
By the way, though I couldn't tell it then, our 
artillery was blazing away at them all the time. 
The fire was so tremendous that we positively 
had no idea our guns were in it at all. But, as a 
matter of fact, they were lambasting Old Harry 
out of the Boche support lines and communica- 
tions, and the countless shells roaring over our 
heads were, half of them, our own. 

It seemed pretty clear to me that this bombard- 
ment was on a very narrow front, much less than 
our Company front even. It didn't seem to be 
much more than a platoon front. So I hurried 
along to the signals and let the O.C. know this. 
As I had expected, he told me to concentrate all 
the men, except sentries, on the flanks of the bom- 
bardment sector, all with smoke helmets on, 
rifles fully charged, bayonets fixed, and everything 
ready for instant action. He had already got 
our Lewis guns ready in the trench on both flanks. 
As a fact, "the Peacemaker" was doing as much 
observing as I was, and I made bold to tell him I 



Bombardment 127 

thought it wasn't the thing for him to expose 
himself as much as he did. 

"That's all right, old man, " he shouted. "I'm 
looking out. I'll be careful, and you do the same. 
Here, stick your pipe in your mouth! It helps 
with the men." 

I'd had to tell him that in the centre and on the 
extreme left we had had a few casualties. The 
stretcher-bearers were doing their best for them. 

Not many minutes afterwards the curtain of fire 
appeared to be shifting back. The row was just as 
great, or greater. The smoke was just as dense, 
and there was a deal more gas in it. But it seemed 
to me there were very few shells actually landing 
along our front, and I could see the flashes of them 
bursting continuously a little in our rear. 

As I got to the left flank of the bombarded sector 
I found Taffy directing the fire of a machine-gun 
diagonally across the front. The men were all out 
there, and you could see them itching for the word 
to get over the parapet. Their faces were quite 
changed. Upon my word, I'd hardly have known 
some of 'em. They had the killing look, and 
nearly every man was fiddling with his bayonet, 
making sure he had the good steel ready for Fritz. 
Seeing they were all serene, I made my way along 



128 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

to the other flank. I hardly thought about it, 
but just went, and that shows there's something 
shapes our ends, doesn't it? I should have been 
pretty sick afterwards if I hadn't made that way 
when I did. 

The first thing I saw on that flank was a couple 

of men lifting poor R 's body from the bottom 

of the trench. The Infant had been killed in- 
stantaneously. His head was absolutely smashed. 
He had been the most popular officer in our mess 
since we came out. 

There was no time to think, but the sight of the 
Infant, lying there dead, sent a kind of sudden 
heat through me from inside; as I felt it on patrol 
that night. I hurried on, with Corporal Slade 
close on my heels. The gassy smoke was very 
dense. Round the next traverse was the little 
bay from which the other machine-gun had been 
firing. It wasn't firing now. Two men were lying 
dead close beside it, and another badly wounded; 

and half across the parapet was Sergeant T , 

who'd been in charge of the gun, being hauled out 
by his arms by two Boches, while two other 
Bodies stood by, one holding his rifle with bayonet 
fixed, in the thrust position, as if inclined to 
run T through. The other Boches were 



Bombardment 129 

shouting something in German. They wanted to 

make T prisoner. There was blood on one 

side of his neck. The insolence of the thing made 
me quite mad for the minute, and I screamed at 
those Boches like a maniac. 

It seems rum, but they turned and bolted into 
the smoke; I after them as hard as I could pelt. 
I shot one in the back with my revolver. He fell 
and, as I came up with him, I snatched his rifle 
from the ground beside him. I was like a lunatic. 
Then, just as suddenly, I came to my senses. The 
other Boches were out of sight in the smoke. I 
jumped back into the trench and put Corporal 
Slade on to the machine-gun, telling him to keep 
traversing that front. I ran farther down the 
trench to discover what had happened. The fire 
trench dipped there into a wooded hollow. The 
pounding of it had levelled the whole place till 
you could hardly make out the trench line. 

Here I found the bulk of my own platoon furiously 
scrapping with thirty or forty Boches over the 
parapet. It was splendid. I can't describe the 
feeling, as one rushed into it. But it was abso- 
lutely glorious. And it gave me my first taste of 
bayonet work in earnest — with a Boche bayonet in 
my hand, mark you. Made me quite glad of the 



130 A " Temporary Gentleman** 

bayonet practice we had at home with Sergeant 

W , after he'd had the course at Aldershot. 

No. i Platoon had never let the beggars get as 
far as our trench, but met 'em outside. To give 
them their due, those Boches didn't try any of 
their "Kamerade" business. They did fight — 
until they saw half their number stuck and down; 
and then they turned and bolted for it into the 
dense smoke over No Man's Land. 

They were most of 'em bayoneted in the back 
before I could get my fellows to turn. I didn't 
want them to go far in that dense fog of gassy 
smoke, and there was hardly any daylight left. I 
didn't want them tumbling into any ambush. 
On the way back we gathered up a score of Boche 
knives, a lot of their caps, two or three rifles, and 
a whole box of their hand grenades, with not one 
missing. 

That was the end of the first bombardment 
we've seen. It lasted exactly an hour, and our 
gunners tell us the Boche sent more than 5000 
shells over in that time. He has certainly knocked 
our line about rather badly. All hands are at 
work now repairing the trench and the wire, with 
a whole Company of R.E. to help. Our casualties 
were eighteen wounded and seven killed. We 



Bombardment 131 

buried thirty-one dead Boches, and they removed 
a good many dead. We got eleven wounded and 
nine un wounded Boche prisoners. Of course, 
they took a lot of their wounded away. They 
captured no prisoners from us. 

I am sorry to say that another of our officers, 
Tony, is among the wounded, but the M.O. says 
he'll be back with us in a week. If only we could 
say that of the Infant ! We are all sad about him ; 
such a, brave lad! but mighty pleased with the 
Company. The Brigadier says the Company has 
done splendidly. He was specially glad to know 
that the Boche collared no prisoners from us. 
It was our first taste, really, of bombardment, 
and of hand-to-hand fighting; and the men are 
now much keener even than they were before 
to get the Boche. They swear he shall pay 
dearly for the Infant and for six of their mates. 
They mean it, too, believe me. And we mean to 
help them get their payment. There isn't so 
much as a scratch on your 

"Temporary Gentleman. 11 



THE DAY'S WORK 

Your letters are a great joy, and I feel that I 
give mighty little in return for their unfailing 
regularity. But I am sure you will understand 
that out here, where there's no writing-table to 
turn to, one simply cannot write half as much as 
one would like. It's astonishing how few mo- 
ments there are in which, without neglect, one can 
honestly say there is nothing waiting to be done. 
In your letter of the fifteenth, at this moment 
propped up in front of me against a condensed 
milk tin, you say: "When you can, I wish you'd 
jot down for me a sort of schedule of the ordinary, 
average day's work in the trenches when there is 
nothing special on, so that I can picture the routine 
of your life." Oh, for more ability as a jotter 
down ! I know by what I used to see in the papers 
before leaving England there's a general idea at 
home that the chief characteristic of trench life is 
its dreary monotony, and that one of our problems 
is how to pass the time. How the idea ever got 

132 



The Day's Work 133 

abroad I can't imagine. I don't see how there 
ever could have been a time like that in trenches. 
Certainly we have never had a hint of it; not the 
shadow of a hint. If anyone has ever tasted the 
boredom of idleness in the trenches — which I 
don't believe, mind you — there must have been 
something radically wrong with his Battalion; his 
Company Commander must have been a rotter. 
And I don't see how that could be. 

A trench, especially in such country as this we're 
in, is not unlike a ship; a rather ancient and leaky 
wooden ship. If you don't keep busy about her 
she leaks like a sieve, gets unworkably encrusted 
and choked by barnacles, and begins to decay. 
If you don't keep improving her, she jolly soon 
begins to go to pieces. Only, I imagine the dis- 
integrating process is a great deal quicker in a 
trench in this part of the world than it could be in 
the most unseaworthy of ships. 

The daily routine? Well, it would be wrong 
to say there isn't any. There is. But it differs 
every day and every hour of the day, except in 
certain stable essentials. Every day brings hap- 
penings that didn't come the day before. One 
fixed characteristic is that it's a twenty-four day, 
rather than twelve hours of day and twelve hours 



134 A "Temporary Gentleman** 

of night. Of course, the overruling factor is 
strafe. But there's also something pretty bossy 
about the condition of your trench. Some kind 
of repairs simply cannot wait. The trench must 
continue to provide cover from observation, and 
some sort of cover from fire, or it ceases to be 
tenable, and one would not be carrying out one's 
fundamental duty of properly holding the sector 
of line to which one is detailed ; which, obviously, 
would be unthinkable. Still, as I say, there are 
some elements of stable routine. Well, here goes. 
It won't cover the ground. I'm not a competent 

enough jotter down for that, but such as it is 

We think of every fresh day as beginning with 
" Stand-to." The main idea behind this function 
is that dawn is the classic moment for an attack. 
I'm not quite sure that this or any other classic 
idea holds good in trench warfare, but "Stand-to" 
is a pretty sound sort of an institution, anyhow. 
We Stand-to one hour before daylight. In some 
Companies the precise hour is laid down overnight 
or for the week. Our skipper doesn't believe in 
that. He likes to make a sort of a test of every 
Stand-to, and so gives no notice beforehand of the 
time at which he is going to order it. And I 
think he's right. 



The Day's Work 135 

You will easily understand that of all things in 
trench warfare nothing is more important than the 
ability of your Company to man the fire-step, 
ready to repel an attack, or to make one, on the 
shortest possible notice. When the order comes 
there must be no fiddling about looking for rifles, 
or appearing on the fire-step with incomplete 
equipment. See how useless that would be in the 
event of a surprise attack in the dark, when the 
enemy could creep very close indeed to your para- 
pet before the best of sentries could give any alarm ! 
Troops in the firing line must be able to turn out, 
equipped in every detail for fighting — for days on 
end of fighting — not only quickly, but instantly; 
without any delay at all. That is why, in the 
British Army, at all events — and I've no doubt 
the French are the same — nobody in the firing line 
is allowed to remove his equipment. Officer and 
man alike, when we lie down to sleep, we lie down 
in precisely the same order as we go into action: 
haversack and water-bottle, ammunition and 
everything complete. That detail of the filled 
water-bottle, for instance, may make all the 
difference between a man who is an asset to his 
country in a critical action and a man who is 
useless and a bad example. You never know the 



136 A "Temporary Gentleman'* 

moment at which an action that will last forty- 
eight hours or more is going to begin ; and, though 
a man may keep going a long while without 
food, he's not much use if he cannot rinse his 
mouth out after a bit. 

But at this rate I shall never get done. It's 
always so when I set out to write to you about 
any specific thing. 

Well, we Stand-to an hour before dawn. It 
happens this way: "the Peacemaker" is in the 
trench doing something, or he comes out of the 
dug-out. He looks at his watch and at the sky, 
and he tells his orderly to bring another orderly. 
Then he says to the pair of them : ' ' Pass the word 
to Stand-to." One bolts along the trench to the 
left and one to the right ; and as they hurry along 
they give the word to every sentry and to everyone 
they see: "St and- to!" Meanwhile "the Peace- 
maker" pokes about and observes, and jumps like 
a hundred of bricks on any man whose bayonet is 
not fixed, whose belt is unbuckled, or who is slow 
in getting to the fire-step. All this time he has 
his watch in his hand. 

Pretty soon the first of those two orderlies comes 
racing back. Very often they see each other 
approaching the Officer Commanding from oppo- 



The Day's Work 137 

site directions, and make a real race of it, and 
report breathlessly: "All correct, sir. ,, To be 
able to do this, they must have got the word from 
each Platoon Sergeant. Probably about this time 
the officer on duty comes along from whatever part 
of the line he happens to have been patrolling 
at the time. And he also reports that all was cor- 
rect in the part of the line he has come from, or that 
such and such a section was a bit behind this 
morning, and that Corporal So-and-so wants a 
little stirring up. 

Also, by this time the Company Sergeant- Major 
will have arrived, with a couple of runners, each 
carrying under his arm a jar of mixed rum-and- 
water, half and half. Rum is never served out 
in any circumstances, save in the presence of an 
officer. So the officer on duty goes to one end of 
the line, and "the Peacemaker" to the other, and 
both work slowly back toward the centre, watching 
the serving out of the rum, and looking carefully 
over each man and his equipment. In the centre, 
the officer on duty probably waits, while the O.C. 
Company goes right on, so that he may see the 
whole of his line and every single man in it. So 
you see, in a way, Stand-to is a parade, as well 
as an important tactical operation. Because, re- 



138 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

member, the sentries are keenly watching all this 
while, and so are a good many more pairs of eyes 
than look out at ariy other time. But, whereas 
the sentries are steadily gazing into the rapidly 
greying mysteries of No Man's Land, the other 
pairs of eyes are only taking occasional sharp 
glances, and then down again, below the parapet. 
There has probably been very little firing from 
either side during this time. Now, very sud- 
denly, a violent crackling starts along to the left of 
the line. Instantly, every exposed head ducks. 
Fritz has started the first verse of his morning 
Hymn of Hate. He always thinks to catch us, 
and never does. We enjoy his hymn, because we 
love to see him waste his ammunition, as he pro- 
ceeds to do now in handsome style. Br-r-r-r-r-r-r- 
r-r-r-r! The spray of his machine-guns traverses 
very neatly up and down the length of our parapet. 
His gunners are clearly convinced that at Stand-to 
time they are certain to get a few English heads. 
Then, as suddenly as he began, he stops; and — 
every head remains ducked. We've been at some 
pains to teach 'em that. Twenty seconds later — 
or it may be two minutes — the spray begins again, 
just where it stopped, or a hundred yards to right 
or left of that. The Boche is quite smart about 



The Day's Work 139 

this; only he seems to act on the assumption that 
we never learn anything. That's where he's 
rather sold. 

And, while Fritz sends forth his morning Hymn, 
our snipers in their carefully-hidden posts have 
their eyes glued on the neighbourhood of his 
machine-gun emplacements; and every now and 
again they get their reward, and the head of a 
Boche machine-gun observer, or some other Teuton 
whose ,curiosity overcomes his discretion, drops 
never to rise any more. 

Before the Hymn began, you understand, the 
greying mystery has grown considerably less mys- 
terious, and one has been able to see almost as 
much in the pearly dawn light as one will see at 
high noon, especially in these misty localities. 

When Fritz has got through the last verse of his 
Hymn he is almost invariably quiet and harmless 
as a sucking dove for an hour or two. I take it he 
makes a serious business of his breakfast. And 
there again he often pays. Our snipers have 
their brekker later, and devote half an hour now 
to observation of the neighbourhood of all the little 
spirals of smoke in the Boche lines which indicate 
breakfast fires. They generally have some luck 
then; and sometimes it becomes worth while to 



140 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

turn on a machine-gun or two, where Fritz's 
appetite has made him careless. 

It is now broad daylight, and our ration parties 
appear, four to each platoon, trailing up the trenches 
from the rear with the breakfast tea and bacon. 
Each party dumps its dixey of tea down in the 
centre of the sector of its platoon, and the Platoon 
Sergeant dishes out to the section commanders 
the whack of bacon for their sections, while all 
hands draw their mugs of tea. The bread and 
jam and "dry rations" were drawn overnight. 
And so to breakfast, in the dug-outs or along the 
fire-step, according to the state of the weather. 
It's breakfast for all hands, except the sentries, 
and they are relieved to get theirs directly the 
men to relieve them have eaten. With the excep- 
tion of those who are on duty, the officers get along 
to the Company dug-out for their breakfast, which 
the batmen have been preparing. They cook it, 
you know, over a brazier — some old pail or tin with 
holes punched in it, consuming coke and charcoal 
mixed, or whatever fuel one has. Fried bacon, 
tea, and bread-and-jam; that's our usual menu. 
Sometimes there may be a tin of fruit as well, 
or some luxury of that sort from home. Always 
there are good appetites and no need of sauce. 



The Day's Work 141 

But, look here, I've just got to stop now. And 
yet I've only reached breakfast in my jotting of 
the day's routine in trenches. Isn't it maddening? 
Well, I'll get another chance to-night or to-morrow, 
and give you some more of it. I really will finish 
it, and I'm sorry I couldn't have done it in one 
letter, as it would have been done by a more 
competent jotter-down of things than your 

1 ' Temporary Gentleman.' ' 



TOMMY DODD AND TRENCH ROUTINE 

You'll be grieved to hear that cheery, indomitable 
little Tommy Dodd was rather badly laid out this 
morning; four or five nasty wounds from shrapnel. 
But I think he'll pull through. He has so much of 
the will to live, and I am sure a soul so uniformly 
cheerful as his must make its body easier to heal. 

I wasn't six paces from him at the time. We 
were fastening some barbed-wire stays on screw 
standards we meant to put out to-night. I had just 
lent him my thick leather gloves after showing him 
exactly how I wanted these stays fixed, with little 
stakes bound on at the end of them, so as to save 
time to-night when we are over the parapet. He was 
busy as a beaver, as he generally is; a bit nearer 
to Whizz-bang Corner than was quite wise — I 
shall always reproach myself for not keeping him 
farther from that ill-omened spot — when the shell 
burst low overhead. I got a dozen tiny flicks 
myself on hands and head, which the M.O. touched 
up with iodine after he bandaged Tommy Dodd. 

142 



Tommy Dodd and Trench Routine 143 

But Tommy was badly hit in the thigh, one arm, 
and the left shoulder. 

He was parchment-colour by the time I got the 
stretcher-bearers along, and that was only a matter 
of seconds. We were close to their little dug-out, 
as it happened. He'd lost a lot of blood. But he 
grinned at me, with a kind of twist in his grin, as 
I helped lift him into the trench stretcher. 

"Looks almost like a Blighty for me, sir, don't 
it? Well, even the Boche must hit something 
sometimes. It's only an outer this time, an' look 
at the thousands o' rounds when he don't get on 
the target at all! Sorry I couldn't 've finished 
them stays, sir. If you send for Davis, o' Num- 
ber 5 Section, you'll find him pretty good at it, 
sir." And then he turned to the stretcher-bearer 
in front, who had the strap over his shoulder, and 
was just bracing himself to start off when he'd 
done talking. "Home, John!" he says, with a 
little kick up of his head, which I really can't 
describe. "An' be sure you don't exceed the 
limit, for I can't abide them nasty low perlice 
courts an gettin' fined." 

And yet, when we got down to Battalion Head- 
quarters, the M.O. told me Tommy Dodd ought by 
all rights to have been insensible, from the blood 



144 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

he'd lost and the shock of those wounds: not sur- 
face wounds, you know. He'll have two or three 
months of hospital comfort now. I hope to good- 
ness nothing septic will intervene. The Battalion 
would be the poorer for it if we lost Tommy. 
The M.O. says he'll pull through. The M.O. 
cropped little patches of hair off round my head, 
to rub the iodine in where I was scratched, so I 
look as if I had ringworm. 

But to get back to business. I've got to "jot 
down" this everyday trench routine for you, 
haven't I? And I only got as far as breakfast 
in yesterday's letter. We'll get a move on 
and run through it now. I'm due on deck di- 
rectly after lunch to relieve Taffy; and it's past 
eleven now. 

After breakfast one-half the men kip down for a 
sleep, and the other half turn to for work. Then 
after the mid-day dinner, the half that rested in 
the forenoon, -work; and throughout the night 
all hands stand their turn at sentry-go. That's 
the principle — in our Company, anyhow. But, of 
course, it doesn't always work out quite like that. 
Everything naturally gives way to strafing con- 
siderations, and at times urgent repairing work 
makes it necessary to forgo half or all the day 



Tommy Dodd and Trench Routine 145 

rest-time. As for the officers — there are only 
three of us now, besides "the Peacemaker' ' — 
one officer is always on duty, day and night. 
We take that in three-hour spells, the three of us. 
Then in the daytime, while the turn of duty is a 
fixed thing, we are, as a matter of fact, about at 
some job or another all the time; just as the O.C. 
Company is about all the twenty-four hours. 
At night we three do take our time off for sleep 
after a tour of duty, unless in some emergency 
or other. "The Peacemaker' ' just gets odd cat- 
naps when he can. 

You might think that if there'd been no particu- 
lar artillery strafing going on there would be no 
necessary repair work for the men to do in the 
trench. But you see, we've practically always 
got a new dugout in course of construction, and a 
refuse pit to be dug, and a sniping shelter to be 
made, and a new bit of trench to be cut. We have 
nine separate sumps where pumps are fixed in our 
line. And if those pumps were not well worked 
each day we'd soon be flooded out. There's 
generally some wire and standards to be got ready 
for putting out at night, with a few "Goose- 
berries" and trip wires where our entanglements 
have been weakened by shell fire. I've never yet 



146 A "Temporary Gentleman " 

seen a trench that wasn't crying out for some sort 
of work on it. 

At breakfast "the Peacemaker * ' will generally 
talk over the jobs he specially wants us to put 
through during the day, and give us any notes he 
may have taken during the night, round the 
trenches. Then chits begin coming in by 'phone 
from Battalion Headquarters; and chits, however 
short and innocent they may look, nearly always 
boil down to a job of work to be done. In fact, 
one way and another, jobs invariably invade the 
breakfast table and every other meal-time; and 
before the tea-mugs are filled up a second time 
one nearly always hears a batman told to "clear 
this end, will you, to make room for me to write 
a chit." 

Then there will be a visitor, probably the CO., 
pretty soon after breakfast, and " the Peacemaker" 
will trot round our line with him, discussing. Ten 
to one that visit will mean more jobs of work; 
and, occasionally, what's a deal more welcome, 
a new plan for a little strafe of some sort. 

And then one sees the ration parties trailing up 
again from the rear, and dinner has arrived ; some 
kind of a stew, you know, as a rule, with bully as 
alternative; potatoes if you're lucky, jam any- 



Tommy Dodd and Trench Routine 147 

how, more tea, and some sort of pickings from 
home parcels in the way of cake or biscuits, figs 
or what not. During and immediately after 
dinner — in the dug-out we call it lunch, from 
habit, but it's about the same thing as the even- 
ing meal, as a rule — we always plan out the 
night's work, patrols, wiring, any little strafe we 
have on, and that sort of thing. 

We are a bit luxurious in "A" Company, and 
generally run to a mug of afternoon tea; some- 
times (if the recent mails have been heavy) to 
an outburst of plum cake or shortbread with it. 
And an hour before dark comes evening Stand-to. 
Technically, this has some tactical significance, 
even as the morning Stand-to has actually. But 
as a matter of fact, in the evening it's a parade, 
more than anything else, to inspect rifles, check up 
ammunition, call the roll, and see the men are all 
right. 

By the way, you asked me something about the 
rum. I don't think it's issued at all in the summer 
months. What we issue now, once a day, is, I 
think, one gill per man of the half-and-half mixture 
of rum and water. I think it's a gill ; a pint mug 
has to supply eight men. I think, on the whole, 
it's a useful issue, and can't possibly do any harm. 



148 A ••Temporary Gentleman *• 

It's thundering good rum; good, honest, mellow 
stuff, and very warming. 

About seven o'clock we generally have a feed, 
from habit, you know, that being the time we 
used to have dinner in camp in England. It's the 
same sort of feed we have in middle day. And 
after that, the officer who is going on duty at 
midnight, say, will generally get a sleep. The usual 
round of night work is well under way by now — 
patrols, wiring parties, work on the parapet, and so 
on, according to what the moon allows. If there's 
too much light, these things have to come later. 

With regard to work for sentry reliefs, the way 
we have in our Company is this: a sentry's relief 
— the sentries are always double by night and 
single by day — must always be within call of the 
sentry ; therefore we never let him go beyond the 
bay next to the one the sentry occupies, that is, 
round the next traverse. Well, we hold the 
reliefs responsible for keeping those two bays in 
good order; clean and pumped, sides revetted, 
fire-step clear and in repair, the duck-boards 
lifted and muck cleared out from under them each 
day, and so forth. All used cartridges have to be 
gathered up and put in the sandbag hung over the 
fire-step for that purpose, for return to store. 



Tommy Dodd and Trench Routine 149 

Unless there is real strafing going on the trenches 
grow pretty silent after midnight. At least, it 
seems so to the officer on duty as he makes his 
way from one end of his line to the other. One 
gets very tired then. There's never any place 
where you can sit down in a trench. I am sure 
the O.C. Company is often actually on his feet 
for twenty- two out of the twenty-four hours. 
I say it's very quiet. Well, it's a matter of com- 
parison, of course. If in the middle of the street 
at two o'clock in the morning at home you heard 
a few rifles fired, you would think it remarkably 
noisy. But here, if there's nothing going on except 
rifle fire, say at the rate of a couple of shots a 
minute, the trenches seem extraordinarily quiet; 
ghostly quiet. 

You go padding along in your gum boots, feeling 
your way with your stick, which usually carries 
such a thick coat of mud on it that its taps on the 
duck-boards are hardly audible. You come round 
the corner of a traverse, and spot a sentry's helmet 
against the sky-line. ''Who goes there?" he 
challenges you, hoarsely, and you answer, "Lieu- 
tenant So-and-so, Regiment," and he gives 

you leave to pass. 

One has to be careful about these challenges. 



150 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

At first the men were inclined to be casual and 
grunt out, "Tha's all right!" or just the name of 
the Regiment when challenged. One had to 
correct that tendency. It is easy for a Boche to 
learn to say "Tha's all right," or to mention the 
name of a Regiment opposite his line. Plenty of 
them have been waiters, barbers, clerks, bakers, 
and so on in London. So we insist on formal 
correctness in these challenges, and the officer 
or man who doesn't halt promptly on being chal- 
lenged takes his chance of a bullet or a bayonet 
in his chest. 

One stops for a word or two with every sentry, 
and one creeps out along the saps for a word with 
the listening posts. It helps them through their 
time, and it satisfies you that they're on the spot, 
mentally as well as physically. There's hardly 
a man in "A" Company who is not an inveterate 
smoker, but, do you know, I have never once got a 
whiff of 'baccy smoke in the neighbourhood of a 
sentry since we've been in trenches, never a suspi- 
cion of it ! Neither have I ever found a sentry who 
was not genuinely watching to his front ; and if the 
Colonel himself comes along and asks one a question 
there's not one of them ever betrayed into turning 
his eyes from his front. They're good lads. 



Tommy Dodd and Trench Routine 151 

And so the small hours lengthen into the rather 
larger ones, and morning Stand-to comes round 
again. It isn't often it's so absolutely uneventful 
as my jottings on the subject, of course. But you 
must just regard this as the merest skeleton out- 
line of the average routine of trench days. And 
then, to be sure, I've left out lots of little things. 
Also, every day brings its special happenings, and 
big or little strafes. One thing we do not get in 
trenches, and I cannot believe we ever should, 
from what I've seen of it; and that is monotony, 
boredom, idleness, lack of occupation. That's a 
fancy of the newspaper writers which, so far as I 
know, has literally no relation whatever to the 
facts of trench life on the British Front in France; 
certainly not to anything as yet seen by your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 



STALKING SNIPERS 

We are trying to work one of our little cunning 
stunts to-day. Last night I had an observation 
patrol out, and having no special job on, decided 
to devote our time to the examination of the 
Boche wire — their entanglements, you know, in 
the sector opposite our particular line. I had only 
two men with me : one of my own Platoon scouts 
and a lad named Hankin, of whom I have great 
hopes as a sniper. He's in my No. 3 Section, and 
a very safe and pretty shot with a rifle, especially 
at long ranges. He'd never been on patrol and 
was most anxious to go, and to have an oppor- 
tunity of looking at the Boche line, to verify his 
suspicions regarding certain holes in the ground 
which he thought their snipers used. Our patrol 
had two interesting results, for one of which we 
have to thank Hankin 's intelligence. The other 
was a bit of luck. The reason I took such a small 
patrol was that the aim was observation pure and 
simple; not strafing; and the men were more than 

152 



Stalking Snipers 153 

usually tired, and had a lot of parapet repair 
work which had to be put through before day- 
light. 

It was about a quarter to one in the morning 
when we went out, there having been too much 
moonlight before then. Hankin had prepared a 
regular chart of the Boche line from his own 
observations from his sniping post; quite a clever 
little map it is, showing clearly his suspected 
sniping shelters, of which there are four. We 
drew a blank in the first two of these, and for the 
third had to tack back from the line of the Boche 
wire, towards our own, along the side of an old 
sap, all torn to bits and broken in with shell fire. 
Hankin felt certain he had seen the flash of rifles 
from this hole; but I thought it was too near our 
own wire to attract any Boche sniper for regular 
use. 

I need hardly say that on a job of this sort one 
moves very slowly, and uses the utmost possible 
precaution to prevent noise. It was now abso- 
lutely dark, the moon having gone down and the 
sky being much overcast. But for my luminous- 
faced compass (which one consults under one's 
coat flap to prevent it from showing) we should 
have been helpless. As it was, on the bearings 



154 A ** Temporary Gentleman M 

I worked out before starting, we steered comfort- 
ably and fairly accurately. 

All of a sudden came a shock, a rifle fired, as 
it seemed, under our noses, actually from about 
twenty-five paces ahead on the track we were 
making. 

"That's him, sir," breathed Hankin in my 
right ear. 

I looked at the compass. The shot came from 
dead on the spot where Hankin' s third hole should 
be; the one we were making for then. 

"How about a little bomb for him, sir?" whis- 
pered the scout on my left. 

But I shook my head. Too much like looking 
for a needle in a bundle of hay, and too much like 
asking the Boche for machine-gun fire. It was 
fair to assume the Boche sniper who fired that shot 
would be facing our trenches; the same direction 
in which we were facing at that moment, since we 
were working back from the German wire towards 
our own. I pushed my lips close up to Hankin 's 
ear and whispered: "We'll try stalking him." 
Hankin nodded, quite pleased. 

Then I whispered to the scout to follow us very, 
very carefully, and not too closely. I didn't want 
him to lose touch, but, for the sake of quietness, 



Stalking Snipers 155 

one would sooner, of course, go alone. We kept 
about six paces between us laterally, Hankin 
and myself, and we advanced by inches. 

I must say I should have been grateful for a 
shade more light, or less inky blackness. The 
edge of that sniper's hole was not sloping, but 
sheer; and, crawling slowly along, I struck my 
right hand clean over it into nothingness, letting 
my chest down with an audible bump. Right 
before me then I heard a man's body swing round 
on the mud, and the sniper let out some kind of 
a German exclamation which was a sort of squeal. 
It was, really, much more like some wild animal's 
cry than anything human. I had to chance it 
then. The sound was so amazingly close. I 
couldn't see him, but — And when I sprang, 
the thing my hands gripped on first was not the 
beggar's windpipe or shoulders, as I had hoped, 
but his rifle, carried in his left hand on his left 
side. 

It was rather like tom-cats coming to blows. I 
swear he spat. As you know, I'm rather heavy, 
and I think my spring, slightly to his left, knocked 
him off his balance. He hadn't any chance. 
But, though I got his left wrist, and covered his 
mouth with my chest, I was a bit uneasy about 



156 A ••Temporary Gentleman ** 

his right hand, which for the moment I couldn't 
find. Lucky for me he hadn't got a dagger in it, 
or he might have ripped me open. But Hankin 
pretty soon found his right hand, and then we 
hauled him up to his feet. I passed his rifle to 
the scout, and we just marched him along the 
front of our wire to Stinking Sap, and so into 
our own front trench ; Hankin holding one of his 
arms, I taking the other, and the scout coming 
behind with the muzzle of the man's own rifle 
in the small of his back. There was no need to 
crawl, the night being as black as your hat; and 
in three or four minutes we had that sniper in 
front of "the Peacemaker" in the Company 
dug-out. 

It was neat, wasn't it? And all thanks to the 
ingenious Hankin 's careful observations and his 
chart. He'll get his first stripe for that, and very 
soon have another to keep it company, or I'm 
much mistaken. "The Peacemaker" was de- 
lighted, and wrote a full report of the capture to 
be sent down to Headquarters with the prisoner. 
Snipers are worth capturing, you know, and this 
looked like an intelligent chap whose cross- 
examination might be useful to our Brass-hats. 

Queer thing about this sniper, he spoke English 



Stalking Snipers 157 

almost like a native. We are not allowed to 
examine prisoners on our own account. All that's 
done by the powers behind the line. But this 
fellow volunteered a little talk while we were 
getting the report made out. He was quite 
satisfied when he realised we were not going to 
harm him in any way, but it was perfectly clear 
he had expected to be done in. You'd have 
thought he would have known better. He'd 
spent nine years in London, part of the time a 
waiter, and later a clerk. He had lived at Ken- 
nington, and then in lodgings on Brixton Hill, I'll 
trouble you. Extraordinary, isn't it? He'd been 
told that London was practically in ruins, and 
that the Zepps had made life there impossible. 
He also thought that we in France were completely 
cut off from England, the Channel being in the 
hands of the German Navy, and England isolated 
and rapidly starving! I gather the Boches in the 
fighting line have no notion at all of the real facts 
of the war. 

Well, having been so far successful, we decided to 
resume our patrol, the main purpose of which — ex- 
amination of the Boche wire — hadn't been touched 
yet. So off we went again down Stinking Sap; 
and I could see that Hankin and Green, the scout, 



158 A ••Temporary Gentleman ** 

bore themselves as victors, with something of the 
swank of the old campaigner and hero of a thousand 
patrols. A great asset, mind you, is a reasonable 
amount of swank. These two had not been out 
before this night, but already they climbed over 
the parapet and moved about in No Man's Land 
with a real and complete absence of the slightest 
hint of nervousness. 

Now I must cut this short because I have to go 
an errand for "the Peacemaker," to have a little 
talk with a Battery Commander. We had a 
pretty good prowl up and down the Boche wire, 
and made an interesting discovery on the extreme 
left of our sector. There was a shade more light 
then ; not from the moon, of course, but from stars ; 
the sky having become less overcast. I ran my 
nose right up against a miniature sign-post; a 
nice little thing, with feathers stuck in cracks near 
the top of it, presumably to give Boche patrols 
their bearings. I should have liked to take it 
away as a souvenir, but I didn't want to arouse 
Hun suspicions, so left it. The interesting thing 
was that this little sign-post — about eighteen 
inches high, planted among the front wire stakes — 
pointed the way in to the Boche trenches by an 
S-shaped lane through their wire entanglements; 



Stalking Snipers 159 

so shaped, of course, as to prevent it from being 
easily seen from our line. 

We crawled along this lane a bit, far enough to 
make sure that it was a clear fairway into the 
Boche front trench. Then I got a careful bearing, 
which I subsequently verified half a dozen times; 
and we made our way back to Stinking Sap. I 
haven't time to tell you of our cunning plan about 
this discovery. That's what I'm to see the 
Battery Commander about. But if we can make 
the arrangement we want to make with the gun- 
ners, we'll bring off a nice little bombing raid 
to-night, and I'll let you know all about it in my 
next letter. Meanwhile I must scurry off, or I 
shall miss the Battery Commander in his rounds, 
and there will be a telling-off for your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 



AN ARTFUL STUNT 

Out of trenches again. I wanted to write you 
yesterday to tell you about the bombing raid of 
our last night in; but we had a full day, and were 
not relieved till late evening; so I got no chance of 
writing till this afternoon. But I can tell you we 
came out with our tails well up this time, and "A" 
Company putting on more side than ever. I dare 
say "D" Company, our closest rivals, will put up 
something pretty startling when we go in again. 
They're very determined to beat our record in 
every kind of strafing, and I'm bound to say they 
do put up some good shows. They've two more 
officers than we have now, and the Boche has 
discovered that they are very much out for busi- 
ness. 

Whether we get Bavarians or Prussians opposite 
us it makes small odds; they've no earthly chance 
of a quiet time while we're in the line. The 
public at home read about the big things, and I 
suppose when they read that "The rest of the 

160 



An Artful Stunt 161 

Front was quiet," they're inclined to wonder how 
we put our time in. Ah, well! the "quiet" of the 
dispatches wouldn't exactly suit a conscientious 
objector, I can assure you. It's a kind of "quiet" 
that keeps Master Boche pretty thoroughly on the 
hop. But on the whole, I'm rather glad the dis- 
patches are like that. I'd be sorry to see 'em 
make a song and dance about these little affairs 
of ours. Only, don't you run away with the idea 
that when you read "Remainder of the Front 
quiet," it means the Boche was being left alone; 
for he isn't, not by long odds. 

You will remember that opposite our extreme 
left I had discovered an S-shaped opening leading 
through the barbed wire to the Boche front line, so 
cut, no doubt, for the convenience of their patrols 
at night. We decided that we would make use of 
that opening for a bombing raid on our last night 
in. Now, you must understand that one of the 
chief uses of the barbed-wire entanglements is to 
keep off the prowling bomber. The entanglements 
extend to, say, forty to sixty paces from the 
trench. You cannot hope to make accurate 
practice in bomb-throwing at a distance of more 
than thirty yards. Consequently, as I explained 
before, to shy bombs into the average trench the 



162 A ••Temporary Gentleman'* 

bomber must worry his way through twenty paces 
or so of barbed-wire entanglements. It is very 
difficult to do that without attracting the attention 
of sentries, and impossible to do it quickly with 
or without noise. Hence you perceive the un- 
pleasant predicament of the bomber when he has 
heaved his first bomb. He has offered himself 
as a target to the Boche machine-guns and rifles 
at a moment when he is in the midst of a maze 
of barbed wire, from which he can only hope to 
retreat slowly and with difficulty. 

Then why not cut a lane through the Boche 
wire by means of shells, just before dark, and use 
that to bomb from after dark? Excellent. Only, 
if you were the Boche and we cut a lane through 
your wire one evening just before dark, wouldn't 
you train a machine-gun or two on that opening 
so that you could sweep it with fire at any moment 
you wished during the night; and wouldn't you 
have a dozen extra rifles with keen eyes behind 'em 
trained on the same spot; and wouldn't you be 
apt to welcome that nice little lane as a trap in 
which you could butcher English Tommies like 
sitting pheasants? Wouldn't you now? 

Well, my business with the Battery Commander 
was to get on his right side and induce him to 



An Artful Stunt 163 

expend a certain number of rounds from his dear 
little guns that afternoon in cutting a nice line 
through the Boche entanglements opposite the 
extreme right of our line. It happened that, 
without interfering with the sort of sinking fund 
process by which the lords of the guns build up 
their precious reserves of ammunition, this parti- 
cular lord was in a position to let us have a few 
rounds. 

Of course, our attitude towards the gunners is 
not always strictly reasonable, you know. We are 
for ever wanting them to spend ammunition, while 
their obvious duty is to accumulate ammunition 
greedily and all the time against the hours of real 
need, so that when these hours come they may 
simply let everything rip — take the lid right off. 
However, for reasons of their own, apart from 
mine, it happened fortunately that the gunners 
were not at all averse from giving that bit of the 
Boche line a mild pounding; and, accordingly, 
they promised us a nice neat lane on the extreme 
right by nightfall. 

We said nothing about the beautiful S-shaped 
lane on the extreme left, which Master Boche 
thought was known only to himself. Observe 
our extreme artfulness. We proceeded to train a 



164 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

grenade rifle on the extreme right, likewise a 
machine-gun. Then we proceeded to tell off our 
best bombers, and overhaul carefully a good 
supply of hand-grenades for use in the S-shaped 
opening on our extreme left. 

Until midnight there was a certain amount of 
moonlight, and for several hours we kept the Boche 
very busy on our extreme right, where, with a 
trifling expenditure of ammunition, the guns had 
cut a lane for us through his barbed wire. I've no 
doubt at all that Fritz had several machine-guns 
concentrated on that spot, and a bunch of rifle- 
men too. He made up his mind he would have 
the English on toast in that lane, and we 
encouraged him to think so. 

You know, at night-time it is not very easy to 
tell the difference between the explosion of a 
hand-grenade and that of a rifle-grenade. But 
whereas the hand-grenade could only be lobbed 
in from among the wire, the rifle-grenade could 
easily be sent over from our trench at that particu- 
lar spot on our right. So we sent 'em over at all 
kinds of confusing intervals. And then, when 
Boche opened machine-gun fire across the lane, 
under the impression that our bombers were at 
work there, we replied with bursts of machine- 



An Artful Stunt 165 

gun fire on his parapet opposite the lane, thereby, 
I make no doubt, getting a certain number of 
heads. It is certain they would be looking out, 
and equally certain they would not be expecting 
fire from our trenches, when they thought we had 
our own bombers out there. 

It was an attractive game, and we kept it going 
till nearly midnight. Then we stopped dead, 
leaving them to suppose we had given up hope of 
overcoming their watchfulness. We arranged to 
reopen the ball at 1.30 a.m. precisely, with rifle- 
grenades and machine-gun fire as might prove 
suitable, but with no end of a row in any case. 

At one o'clock I started from Stinking Sap, on 
our extreme left, with twelve of our best bombers, 
each carrying an apronful of bombs. There 
wasn't a glimmer of any kind of light. We made 
direct for the S-shaped opening, and lay down 
outside the wire there. In our own trench, 
before starting, we had made all arrangements. 
I had six men on either side of me, and each man 
knew precisely what his particular job was. 
"The Peacemaker" never tires of insisting on that 
principle, and, of course, he is right. Nothing is 
any good unless it is worked out beforehand so 
that each man knows exactly his job, and con- 



166 A "Temporary Gentleman •• 

centrates on that without reference to anyone 
else, or any hanging about waiting instructions. 

At 1.20 we began crawling down the S-shaped 
opening in our proper order. At 1.30 the first 
rifle-grenade ripped over from the extreme right 
of our line. Others followed in quick succession, 
and on the report of the sixth we jumped to our 
feet and ran forward, extending to right and left 
from me as we reached the inside of the wire, and 
chucking our first bombs — thirteen of 'em — as we 
got into position. It was so close there was no 
possibility of missing, and I can tell you thirteen 
bombs make some show when they all explode 
beautifully right inside a trench a few yards in 
front of you. 

Then we all scrambled over the parapet down 
into the trench over a front of, say, thirty paces. 
The six men on my right hand at once turned to 
their right, and those on my left to their left. It 
worked splendidly. Each party travelled along 
the trench as quickly as it could, bombing over 
each traverse before rounding it. The row was 
terrific. 

In that order each party went along six suc- 
cessive bays of the trench. Then immediately 
they began to reverse the process, travelling more 



An Artful Stunt 167 

slowly this time and bombing more thoroughly. 
They were working back on their centre now, you 
understand, still bombing outward, of course. 
We had the luck to strike a splendid piece of trench 
with no fewer than three important dug-outs in it, 
and we made a shambles of each of them. It was 
wildly exciting while it lasted, but I suppose we 
were not more than four or five minutes in the 
trench. We exploded thirty-two bombs during 
those /few minutes, every single one of them with 
good effect; and when we scrambled out into the 
S-shaped opening again we took with us an un- 
damaged Boche machine-gun and four prisoners, 
one of them wounded and three un wounded. We 
killed nine men in the trench, and a good round 
number in the three dug-outs. I had a bunch of 
maps and papers from the first of those dug-outs. 
And we didn't improve their trench or the dug-outs. 
Thirty-two bombs make a difference. 

The machine-gun hampered us a bit, but I can 
tell you we made pretty good time getting across 
to Stinking Sap. The Boches were hopelessly 
confused by the whole business, and while we were 
crossing to the extreme left of our own line they 
were wildly blazing at our extreme right and pour- 
ing flares and machine-gun fire over the lane 



168 A ** Temporary Gentleman •• 

through their wire. Naturally, nobody was in the 
least exposed on our right, except perhaps the 
man operating the machine-gun, which probably 
did good execution among Boche observers of 
that neat little lane our artillery had cut for us. 
__ It was a delightful show and cost us nothing in 
casualties, except two men very slightly wounded, 
one in the right foot and the other in the left hand 
and arm from our own bomb splinters. But, as 
our good old bombing Sergeant said, it "fairly 
put the wind up them bloomin' sauer-krauters." 
Incidentally, and owing far more to the fine 
behaviour of the men than to anything I did, it 
earned a lot of bouquets from different quarters 
for your 

1 ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 

P.S. — Next day's report as served up to you 
and the public in the newspapers at home would, 
of course, and rightly enough no doubt, include our 
sector in the "remainder of the Front, " which was 
"quiet." Or we might be included in a two-line 
phrase about "minor activities," or "patrols were 
active on various points of the line" — as they 
certainly are all the time. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE MEN 

The parcels from W 's arrived all safe and 

sound, thanks to your careful arrangements, and 
we are, in consequence, living in the lap of luxury. 
The tinned fruit is specially appreciated, and very 
good for us, I've no doubt. By the way, you will 
be glad to know that the boiler-maker's suit in one 
piece of water-proofed canvas is a huge success. 
I wore it on that last bombing raid. For patrol 
work, or wiring, for anything over the parapet, 
and in the trench, too, at night-time, for instance, 
I don't think there's anything to beat it. There's 
nothing to catch or get in one's way, and it's a 
great joy to keep one's ordinary clothes clean and 
decent. On patrol it's better than oilskin, because 
it's silent — doesn't rustle. 

I dare say you've heard that phrase — I forget 
whose it is — about the backbone of the Army 
being the non-commissioned man. I suspect it 
was all right when it was written, and goodness 
knows, there's not much the matter with the non- 
169 



170 A ** Temporary Gentleman ft 

commissioned man to-day. Only, there isn't the 
difference that there was between the N.C.O. and 
the "other ranks''— the men. The N.C.O. isn't 
the separate type he was, because the N.C.O. 
of to-day is so often the man of yesterday; pro- 
motion having necessarily been rapid in the New 
Army. We had to make our own N.C.O.'s from 
the start. They're all backbone, now, men and 
N.C.O.'s alike. And the officers are quite all right, 
thank you, too. I doubt whether officers in any 
Army have ever worked harder than the officers of 
our New Army — the "Temporary Gentlemen," 
you know — are working to-day. They have had 
to work hard. Couldn't leave it to N.C.O.'s, you 
see, because, apart from anything else, they've 
had to make the N.C.O.'s out of privates; teach 
'em their job. So we're all backbone together. 

And when you hear some fellow saying "The 
men are splendid," you need not think he's just 
paying a conventional tribute or echoing a stereo- 
typed kind of praise. It's true; "true as death, " 
as Harry Lauder used to sing; it's as true as any- 
thing I know. It's Gospel truth. The men are 
absolutely and all the time splendid. 

I'm not an emotional sort of a chap, and I'm 
sure before the war I never gave a thought to such 



The Spirit of the Men 171 

things; but, really, there is something incurably 
and ineradicably fine about the rough average 
Englishman, who has no surface graces at all. 
You know the kind I mean. The decency of him 
is something in his grain. It stands any test you 
like to apply. It's the same colour all the way 
through. I'm not emotional; but I don't mind 
telling you, strictly between ourselves, that since 
I've been out here in trenches I've had the water 
forced into my eyes, not once, but a dozen times, 
from sheer admiration and respect, by the action 
of rough, rude chaps whom you'd never waste a 
second glance on in the streets of London; men 
who, so far from being exceptional, are typical 
through and through; just the common, low-down 
street average. 

That's the rough, rude, foul-mouthed kind, with 
no manners at all, and many ways that you hate. 
But I tell you, under the strain and stress of this 
savage existence he shows up for what he really is, 
under his rough, ugly hide: he's jewel all through 
without an ounce of dirty Boche meanness or 
cruelty in his whole carcass. You may hate his 
manners if you like but you can't help loving him ; 
you simply can't help it if you work alongside of 
him in the trenches in face of the enemy. 



172 A *' Temporary Gentleman" 

And that's not the only type we've got that 
makes you want to take your hat off to Tommy, 
and that puts a real respect, which perhaps the 
civilian doesn't understand, into your salutes. 
(It's only silly puppy boys, or officers who've never 
been in the presence of an enemy, or faced imme- 
diate danger with men, who can't be bothered 
properly and fully acknowledging salutes. You 
watch a senior, one who's learned his lessons in 
real service, and you'll find nothing grudging or 
casual or half-hearted. We get into the French 
way here, with a hint of the bow, a real salutation 
in our salutes.) Even more striking, I sometimes 
think, is the sterling stuff we find in types of men 
in the ranks who haven't naturally anything rough 
or hard about them : like my ex-draper chap, you 
know, in No. 3 Platoon, Ramsay. We've a 
number of the same calibre. He was a pillar of 
his chapel at home and — of all things — a draper: 
a gentle, soft-spoken dealer in ribbons and tape. 
I told you, I think, how he fought with a man in 
his section when he fancied he was not going to be 
allowed to go out one night with a bombing party. 

You read about calling for volunteers. With 
our lot it's hopeless to call for volunteers for a 
dangerous job. The only thing to do would be to 



The Spirit of the Men 173 

call for volunteers to stay behind. The other 
thing's simply a way of calling out the whole 
Company; and if it happens to be just half a 
dozen you want, that's awkward. 

Then there's the matter of grousing — growling 
among themselves about this and that. You 
would be deceived about this until you got to 
know them a bit. It's a queer thing, and not 
easy to explain, but grousing is one of the passions 
of their ; lives, or, perhaps it would be truer to say, a 
favourite form of recreation. But, mark you this, 
only when everything is going smoothly, and there 
is nothing real to grumble about. It would seem 
to be absolutely forbidden to growl when there's 
anything to growl about; a sort of unwritten law 
which, since we've been out here, anyhow, is never 
transgressed. 

It's rather fine, this, you know, and very English. 
So long as there's a little intermittent grousing 
going on you can be quite sure of two things — that 
there's nothing wrong and that the men are in 
good spirits and content. If there's no grousing, 
it means one of two things — either that the men 
are angered about something, in which case they 
will be unusually silent, or that we are up against 
real difficulties and hardships involving real suffer- 



174 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

ing, in which case there will be a lot of chaffing and 
joke-cracking and apparent merriment. 

Queer, isn't it? But I think it's a true descrip- 
tion. If a long day's hard labour — clearing out a 
trench and building up a parapet, we'll say — is 
undone and washed out just as it's finished by a 
succession of Boche oil-cans, mortars, and general 
bombardment, which also lays out a few good men, 
and blows the next meal rations sky-high, so that 
there's the prospect of a long night's extra hard 
work where some rest had been expected, and all on 
an empty stomach — then you'll hear no grousing 
at all, but any number of jocular remarks: 

"I tell you, the Army of to-day's all right!" 
"We don't get much pay, but, my word, we do see 
life!" "Save me a lot o' trouble, this will. My 
fightin' weight was goin' up a lot too fast, but 
this '11 save me givin' up my port wine an' turtle 
soup!" Then some wag pretends to consult his 
newspaper, and, looking up, announces that: "On 
the remainder of the Front the night was com- 
paratively quiet." "Yes," says another, quoting 
further from the imaginary news, "and the ban- 
quet which had been arranged for 'A' Company 
was pos'poned till the following day. " ' ' When it is 
hoped, " adds yet another joker, "that a number of 



The Spirit of the Men 175 

prominent Boche prisoners will attend." Elabo- 
rate winks and nods; and one man positively 
licks his lips as he mutters : ' ' Gosh ! If only they 
really would come over the sticks to-night; if 
only they would!" "Reg'ler bloomin' pacifist, 
isn't he?" remarks a student of the Press, "longin' 
to welcome the gentle Hun with open arms, he is 
— not 'arf!" "We'll welcome him all right, if 
only the beggar 'd come. I'd like to use a section 
or two of 'em for buildin' up this bloomin' parapet. 
Be stirrer than these sand-bags full o' slush." 
"Shame! An' you a yewmanitarian, too. Why, 
how'd our poor chaps ever be able to stand the 
smell of all them potted Huns, an' so close, too? 
You're too harsh, mate; reg'ler Prussian, I call 
you." 

So it goes on. It's a bitter cold night. They 
are up nearly to their thighs in half-frozen slush. 
Their day's work has been entirely undone in half 
an hour, and has to be done over again without 
any interval for rest; and the supper ration's 
"gone West." You can hardly imagine what the 
loss of a meal means, with a night like that ahead 
of you, and occasional shells still dropping round 
the bit you must repair. They look awful ruffians, 
these chaps; caked all over with mud, hair and eye- 



176 A ** Temporary Gentleman" 

brows and all; three or four days' stubble on their 
chins, and all kinds of ribaldry on their lips. 
They love their ease and creature comforts at 
least as much as any conscientious objector could; 
and God knows they are here as far removed 
from ease and creature comfort as men well could 
be — entirely of their own free will. And they 
will carry on all night, cracking their simple jokes 
and chaffing one another, and jostling each other to 
get to the front if one or two are required for any- 
thing extra dangerous. And the spirit that dic- 
tates their little jokes, isn't it as fine as any shown 
in bygone days by the aristocrats of France and 
England? If you told these fellows they were 
aristocrats, imagine how they'd take it! "'Ere, 
'op it! Not so much of it! Wotcher givin'us?" 
But aren't they — bless 'em! I tell you, when I 
come to compare 'em with the fellows we're up 
against across the way; with those poor devils 
of machine-driven Boches, with their record of 
brutish murder and swinishness in Belgium — why, 
there's not a shadow of doubt in my mind they are 
real aristocrats. The war has helped to make 
them so, of course. But, whatever the cause, they 
stand out, with the splendidly gallant poilus of 
France: true aristocrats — five hundred miles of 



The Spirit of the Men 177 

'em from the North Sea to Switzerland, pitted 
against the deluded and brutalised, machine-driven 
Boches. There are no officers and machine 
driving our fellows, or the cheery, jolly French 
soldiers. Held back occasionally, directed always, 
they may be. There's no need of any driving 
on our side. Unquestioning obedience to an 
all-powerful machine may be a useful thing in its 
way. I know a better, though; and that's con- 
vinced, willing, eager determination, guided — 
never driven — by officers who share it, and share 
everything else the men have and do. And that's 
what there is all down our side of the line, from the 
North Sea to Switzerland. 

But, look here; I've just read through my last 
page, and it seems to me I've been preaching, rant- 
ing, perhaps. I'd better stow it and get on with 
my work. You see, one can't talk this kind of 
thing; and yet — I don't know, one feels it pretty 
often, and rather strongly. It's a bit of a relief 
to tell you something about it — in writing. Even 
to you, I probably shouldn't, by word of mouth, 
you know. One doesn't, somehow; but this sort 
of chatting with a pen is different. All I actually 
want to say, though it has taken such a lot of 
paper to say it on, is that the men really are 



178 A ** Temporary Gentleman " 

splendid. I love them. (It certainly is easier 
writing than talking.) I want you to know about 
it; to know something about these chaps — they 
come from every class of the community — so 
that you'll love 'em, too. I wish we could make 
every woman, and every man and child, too, in 
England understand how fine these fellows are, 
and how fine, really, the life they're leading is. 

For sheer hardness and discomfort there's 
nothing in the life of the poorest worker in England 
to compare with it. They are never out of instant 
danger. And the level of their spirits is far higher 
than you'd find it in any model factory or work- 
shop at home. Death itself they meet with little 
jokes; I mean that literally. And the daily round 
of their lives is simply full of little acts of self- 
sacrifice, generosity, and unstudied, unnoted hero- 
ism, such as famous reputations are based upon in 
civil life in peace time. I feel I can't make it 
plain, as it deserves to be. I wish I could. But 
you must just accept it because I say it, and love 
'em all — the French as well as ours — because 
they've made themselves loved by your 

"Temporary Gentleman." 



AN UNHEALTHY BIT OF LINE 

Rather to the general surprise, we have been 
moved into a new sector of the line, immediately 
south of what we called "our own." We have 
not been told why — the Olympians do not deal in 
whys and wherefores — but, according to gossip, 
we can take our choice between the wish to make us 
all familiar with the general lie of the land round 
here, to be the better prepared for a push; and the 
undoubted fact that a new Division is being moved 
into the line, and that our move southward facili- 
tates this. Perhaps the real reason of the move 
is a mixture of both these; but, whether or no, 
the move itself provides striking evidence of the 
marked differences which exist between different 
parts of the line, and the extremely narrow and 
circvmscribed nature of the knowledge one gets 
of the Front while serving in trenches. 

Our "B" Company is holding just now the sub- 
section which actually adjoins the right of the 
sector we used to hold. We are on the right of 

179 



180 A "Temporary Gentleman •• 

"B," and "C" is on our right, with "D" back in 
the support line. Even "B's" bit, though it does 
adjoin our old beat, differs greatly from that; 
and our present short line is hemispheres away 
from the sector we knew before. There's not 
very much of it — about half the length of the line 
we last held — but what there is is hot and strong, 
I can tell you. The way in which " B " Company's 
bit differs is chiefly that it's in sandy soil, instead of 
all clay, and so is much drier and cleaner, more 
habitable in every way than anything we are 
accustomed to. But our bit, variously known 
as Petticoat Lane (why, I can't imagine), Cut- 
Throat Alley (obvious enough), and The Gut — 
well, our bit is, as "the Peacemaker" said directly 
he saw it, "very interesting." I think that's 
about the kindest thing you can say of it; and 
interesting it certainly is. 

To begin with, the greatest distance between 
any one spot in it and the Boche front line is 
seventy or eighty yards; and there's a place at 
which it's only half that. But the salient point in 
the whole sector is this : the half of our line that is 
seventy or eighty yards from the Boche line has 
between it and the Boche line a string of craters, 
the far lips of which are not more than fifteen 



An Unhealthy Bit of Line 181 

to twenty paces from Fritz's sentries. These 
craters are sometimes occupied by the Boche 
and sometimes by us; but nobody attempts to 
hold them by day; they don't give shelter enough 
for that ; and the betting as to who is to hold tnem 
on any given night is about even. 

You might almost say, ''But why should any- 
body want to hold the beastly things?" And if 
you ever set foot in one of them, you'd say it 
with some feeling, for it's like trying to walk, or 
rather to crawl, in a bottomless pit of porridge. 
When dusk is coming on of an evening half a dozen 
of our bombers may start crawling from our 
parapet, making for the nearest crater. Maybe 
Fritz is dull and misses them. Maybe he opens 
such a hot fire they have to shin back quick. May- 
be, just as we are getting close to the near edge of 
a crater, and flattering ourselves we've been a bit 
too nippy for the Boche this time, we get a rousing 
welcome from the crater itself, in the shape of three 
or four well-aimed bombs among us. Then those 
of us who are still able to think realise that the 
Boche has been a bit beforehand and got there 
first. Next night the process is reversed. During 
last night those confounded craters changed hands 
three times, remaining at last, I am glad to 



182 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

say, with us. We lost one man killed and two 
wounded. But we brought back two wounded 
and one dead Boche, and we reckon to have 
knocked out at least six others. 

It was a nightmare of a night, to tell the truth, 
but nothing big enough to get into dispatches. 
One point about the holding of these craters is 
that it enables you to lob bombs, or almost any- 
thing else for that matter, into the Boche front 
trench. Down here we really are learning some- 
thing about oil-cans, mortars, and short range 
heavy stuff generally. It's very much hand-to- 
hand warfare, and, I suppose because of that, 
much more savage and more primitive than any- 
thing we've seen before. There practically isn't 
any No Man's Land here. It's just our trench 
and their trench and the muddy, bloody cock-pit 
between, all churned into a slushy batter by high 
explosives, and full of all manner of ghastly re- 
mains. Souvenirs! By Heavens! the curio hunt- 
ers could find all they wanted here within a few 
yards of where I'm sitting, but not many of 'em 
would have the spunk to gather 'em in. You see, 
I haven't any great respect for the souvenir 
hunter. He seems a ghoulish sort of a creature to 
me, and I can't believe the cynical old "Peace- 



An Unhealthy Bit of Line 183 

maker" when he says the bulk of them, and all 
the more inveterate sort, are women. 

The CO. tells "the Peacemaker" he is so 
arranging things that no Company will get more 
than four days on end in Petticoat Lane, and then 
the other three days of the turn in trenches, in the 
support line, where Battalion Headquarters is. 
"A" Company, of course, takes glory to itself 
for having been the first to be sent in here, and I 
think this fully compensates them for the fact that 
nobody's had any rest worth speaking about since 
we got in. We shall probably do better in that 
respect when we have time to get used to the 
change. In fact, I can see a difference already in 
the men's attitude. But, mind you, the change is 
radical, from two hundred yards' interval between 
yourself and Fritz, down to fifty yards. It 
affects every moment of your life, and every mortal 
thing you do. More, it actually affects what you 
say. You don't make any telephonic arrange- 
ments about patrols and that sort of thing here. 
We are learning German at a great rate. But 
it was very startling to our fellows the first night, 
when they found they could hear voices in the 
enemy line. It seemed to bring Fritz and his 
ingenious engines very close indeed. 



184 A " Temporary Gentleman" 

But already the men have begun to crack their 
little jokes about it, and pretend to be careful 
about setting down a canteen of tea or a bit of 
bread lest one of "them bloomin' sauerkraut ers 
lean over and pick it up before you can turn round 
— hungry blighters !" I confess I'm conscious 
that the nearness represents a great deal of added 
nerve strain; but, thank goodness, the men don't 
seem to feel it a bit. They're just as jolly as ever. 
But it is mighty intimate and primitive, you 
know. 

Imagine! The first thing I laid my hand on 
when I got into a crater on our first night, after 
we'd bombed Fritz out of it, was the face of a 
wounded Boche; and he bit my little finger to the 
bone, so that I had to have it washed and dressed 
by the M.O. for fear of poisoning. It's nothing; 
but I mention it as an instance of the savage 
primitiveness of this life at close quarters with 
the Boche. 

There's simply no end to his dodgy tricks here. 
Three or four of 'em will cry out for help from a 
crater — in English, you know — and pretend to be 
our own men, wounded and unable to move, or 
Boches anxious to give themselves up. And then, 
if anyone's soft enough to get over the parapet 



An Unhealthy Bit of Line 185 

to go and lend a hand, they open a hot fire, or 
wait till we get very near and then bomb. We had 
verbal warnings in plenty from the Company we 
relieved, but it's experience that teaches; and, 
whilst they may not be brilliant tricksters — they're 
not, — our fellows will at all events never allow the 
same trick to be worked off twice on us. 

By his fondness for all such petty tricks as these 
— and, of course, they have dozens of dirtier ones 
than this — the Boche has rather shut the door on 
chivalry. Given half a chance, the natural in- 
clination of our men is to wage war as they would 
play cricket — like sportsmen. You've only to 
indicate to them that this or that is a rule of the 
game — of any game — and they're on it at once. 
And if you indicated nothing, of their own choice 
they'd always play roughly fair and avoid the 
dirty trick by instinct. But the Boche washes 
all that out. Generosity and decency strike 
him as simply foolishness. And you cannot 
possibly treat him as a sportsman, because he'll 
do you down at every turn if you do; and here in 
Petticoat Lane being done down doesn't only mean 
losing your money. As a rule, you haven't any 
of that to lose. It means — "going West for 
keeps"; that is, being killed. It's that sort of 



186 A "Temporary Gentleman •• 

thing that has made Petticoat Lane life savage 
and primitive; and the fact that it's so close and 
intimate as to be pressing on you all round all 
the time, that is what gives the additional nerve 
strain. 

It is, of course, a great place for little raids. 
The trenches are so close that you're no sooner out 
of your own than you're on top of theirs. And I 
take it as evidence of the moral superiority being 
on this side of the line, that we see very much more 
of their trenches than they ever see of ours. It 
is a great deal more difficult to repair trenches 
here than it was when we were a couple of hundred 
yards away from the enemy, because of the fre- 
quency of the oil-cans and bombs. The conse- 
quence is that, from the point of view of the cover 
they give, both our trenches and the Bodies' 
are much inferior to those we had before. But, 
curiously enough, we have some very decent dug- 
outs here, deep and well protected. 

In fact, take it all round, we are not so badly 
off at all. And " interesting" the place most cer- 
tainly is. ("The Peacemaker" generally means 
1 ' dangerous ' ' when he says ' ' interesting . " ) There ' s 
something doing in the strafing line pretty nearly 
all the time ; and strafing is a deal more interesting 



An Unhealthy Bit of Line 187 

than navvying, pumping, and mud-shovelling. 
The chances for little shows of one sort and another 
are more numerous here than where we were before. 
We've tried one or two already, and when we get 
back • into the support line you shall have full 
particulars from your somewhat tired but quite 
jolly 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 



THEY SAY- 



We were relieved in Petticoat Lane by "D" 
Company last night, and took the place they'd 
held in the support line; "a corner of Heaven 
itself," of course, after The Gut. And I have 
had a most luxurious and delightful day to-day, 
out of trenches altogether. 

Our O.C. " the Peacemaker " — you do remember, 
don't you, that the Officer Commanding the 
Battalion is the CO., and the Officer Commanding 
the Company the O.C: saves confusion — is an 
awfully good chap. He didn't say anything about 
it, but I feel sure he put me on my job of to-day — 
chose me for it — because he thought it would be 
good for me. He was ordered to send an officer 

to arrange about billets for the Company in 

ready for when we go out. Taffy's been a bit 
under the weather in Petticoat Lane, and is able 
to get a rest here in support. This meant rather 
more sticking to it for me in the front line, and, as 
a matter of fact, I didn't get an hour's sleep while 

188 



They Say 189 

we were there. We had little strafes going most 
of the time, and I was rather cheap when we came 
out last night; bit shaky, you know; that's all. 
Two Boche mines were exploded in The Gut 
while we were there ; both with extraordinarily little 
loss to us. But I was lifted out of the trench by 
one of 'em ; and I suppose these things do indirectly 
affect one a bit, somehow, even when there is 
nothing to show for it; at all events, when they 
are combined with shortage of sleep. 

Anyhow, I'm as right as ninepence to-night, and 
had a fine sleep after midnight yesterday. And 
to-day, with "the Peacemaker's" horse for 
company, I've been playing the country gentleman 
at large and fixing up billets for the Company, and 
done pretty well for 'em, too. It was something 
of a race between Grierson of "D" and myself 
for the best officers' mess and sleeping quarters in 

; but Grierson hadn't much chance, really. 

He hasn't even my smattering of French, and his 
O.C. had not lent him a horse. 

The goodwife at the place I've got for ourselves 
is a torrential talker, and in rounding up the boys 
and girls working on her farm she shows a bit of 
a temper; but I'm certain she's a jolly capable 
manager, and she has promised to cook for us, 



190 A ** Temporary Gentleman M 

which will mean a fine change from the batman's 
efforts in that line. Also the billets themselves 
are good, those for the men being the best I've 
seen anywhere: dry as a chip, and thoroughly 
sheltered from the wind. We shall be in clover 

for our week out, especially as I think is a bit 

too far back to admit of our being on trench 
fatigues at all while out. 

I did enjoy the pottering about on my own, and 
the nearest firing being three or four miles away 
all the time, made everything seem so extra- 
ordinarily peaceful after the roaring racket and 
straining watchfulness of Cut-Throat Alley ; where 
one's eyes sort of ache from trying to look all 
ways at once, and one's ears and head generally 
get dead from the effort of recording the precise 
meaning of each outstanding roar in the continu- 
ous din. Also I met two or three interesting 
people, including the Town Major in . 

I had some grub about one o'clock in a big 
estaminet, almost a restaurant, really; and it was 
most interesting, after the trenches, to listen to 
the gossip and eat without feeling you had to 
look out for anything. There are a number of 
French residents left in this place, and this makes 
it different from the village we were last in, just 



They Say 191 

behind the line, where the inhabitants have left, 
and the place is purely a camp, and partly in ruins 
at that. This place still has a natural human sort 
of life of its own, you know. And there are 
women in it, and a priest or two, and cows and 
sheep, and a town-crier, and that sort of thing — 
something fascinatingly human about all that, 
though it is within four miles of the firing line. 

The cafe was simply full of rumours and gossip. 
Military gossip is, of course, taboo with strangers 
and civilians, and rightly, since one cannot be sure 
who is and who is not a spy. But I suppose there's 
no harm in it among people who can recognise 
each other's uniforms and badges. Anyhow, I 
heard a lot to-day, which may or may not have 
anything in it. 

The things that interested me most were things 
about our own bit of front, and there were two 
definite reports about this. First, I heard that 
we are to throw out a new front-line trench to bridge 
the re-entrant south of Petticoat Lane. And then 
I heard we are to make a push to collar the Boche 
front line on the bend opposite us, because a few 
hundred yards of line there would mean a lot to us 
in the straightening of our front generally, and in 
washing out what is undoubtedly a strong corner 



192 A ** Temporary Gentleman" 

for the Boche now, because it gives him some fine 
enfilading positions. If this were brought off it 
would wash out The Gut altogether as firing line, 
and that in itself would be a godsend. Also it 
would mean a real push, which is naturally what 
we all want. We think the fact of that extra 
Division having been fitted into our line rather 
endorses the report, and are feeling rather bucked 
in consequence. The whole Battalion, and for 
that matter the whole Division, is just spoiling 
for the chance of a push, and I doubt whether we've 
a man who wouldn't volunteer for the front line 
of the push at this moment, and jolly glad of the 
chance. 

I said in my last letter that I'd tell you about 
our little strafing stunts while we were in Petticoat 
Lane. But, really, this new prospect of a push 
and the report about the new front-line trench 
to be cut make them seem pretty small beer, and 
quite a long way off now, anyhow. You remember 
I told you there was a startling difference between 
the left of our present sector and the right of the 
one we were in before. It wasn't only the difference 
between clay and sand, you know. It was that, 
whereas the right of the old sector was hundreds 
of yards away from the Boche — as much as six 



They Say 193 

and seven hundred in parts — the left of the present 
sector runs down to sixty or seventy yards where 
it joins Petticoat Lane. 

That means a big re-entrant in the line, of course, 
and a part where our front runs almost at right 
angles to Fritz's, instead of parallel with it. The 
new trench would be to bridge the mouth of this 
re-entrant, and equalise the distance between our 
line and the Boche's, right along. Apart from 
anything else, it would make any subsequent 
push rriuch easier. It's a low-lying, wet, exposed 
bit, that re-entrant; but this wouldn't matter if 
we were just going to use it as a jumping-off place, 
which is what we hope. 

However, as there's no official news, one mustn't 
think too much about it. 

It seems there's been some sickness at our 
Brigade Headquarters, which is a chateau marked 
large on the map, though out of sight from the 
Boche line. The sickness among the orderlies 
was attributed to something queer about the 
drains, and I suppose the thing was reported on. 
Anyhow, as the story I heard to-day goes, a 
tremendous swell arrived in a car to have a look 
at the place; an Olympian of the first water, 
you understand. No doubt I should be executed 
13 



194 A '* Temporary Gentleman** 

by means of something with boiling oil in it if I 
mentioned his name. As he stepped from his car 
outside the chateau two shells landed, one on the 
lawn and one in the shrubbery. The Olympian 
sniffed at Fritz's insolence. Before he got into 
the doorway another shell landed very near his 
car, and spattered it with mud from bonnet to 
differential. The august one is reported to have 
greeted the Brigadier by saying rather angrily: 

"This is obviously a most unhealthy spot, sir; 
most unhealthy. Ought never to have been 
chosen." 

But a better yarn was the one a subaltern of the 
R.E. told me as I was jogging back to the trenches. 
This was about the sector next but one north of us. 
It seems a Boche 'plane was being chased by a 
British 'plane, and making heavy weather of it. 
The Englishman had perforated the other fellow's 
wings very badly, and partly knocked out his 
engine, too. .Anyhow, the Boche 'plane was 
underdog, and descending rapidly midway be- 
tween our front line and his own, right over the 
centre of No Man's Land. Naturally the men 
in the trenches on both sides were wildly excited 
about it. The story is they forgot everything 
else and were simply lining the parapets, yelling 



They Say 195 

encouragement to their respective airmen as 
though they had front seats at Brooklands or the 
Naval and Military Tournament. Seeing this, a 
pawky old Scot — it was a Highland regiment on our 
side-^-slipped quietly down on the fire-step in the 
midst of the excitement, and began making accu- 
rate but leisurely target practice; carefully pick- 
ing out Boches forty or fifty yards apart from each 
other, so as not to give the show away too soon. 
He did, pretty well, but was bitterly disappointed 
when the Boche's Archibald forced our 'plane 
to rise, just as the Boche airman managed to jigger 
his machine somehow into his own support lines, 
and the spectators took cover. 

"Och, no a'thegither sae badly, surr, " says 
Scotty to his Platoon Commander. "Ah man- 
aged to get nine o' the feckless bodies; but Ah 
hopet for the roond dizen!" 

Rather nice, wasn't it? 

Those little shows of ours in Cut-Throat Alley 
were practically all bombing, you know; but we did 
rather well in the matter of prisoners taken in the 
craters, and of Boches otherwise accounted for. 
Our own casualties for the four days were two 
killed — both in my Platoon, and both men with 
wives at home, I grieve to say; thundering good 



196 A •• Temporary Gentleman M 

chaps — and six wounded; two only slightly. We 
reckon to have got twenty or thirty Boches 
wounded, and at least ten killed; and there is no 
sort of reckoning needed about the eleven prisoners 
we certainly did take in the craters and sent 
blindfolded down to Headquarters. I believe 
this beats the record of the Company we relieved, 
which, of course, knew the place better; and our 
CO. is pleased with us. I have to go now and 
tell off a small carrying party. Though feeling a 
bit shaky yesterday, I'm as right as right can be 
again now, so mind, you have no earthly reason to 
worry about your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 

P.S. — "The Peacemaker" has just got word 
from Battalion Headquarters itself that it's 
perfectly correct about the new front-line trench 
to be cut; and it is believed "A" Company is to 
have something to do with it. So that's real news ; 
and we feel sure it means a push to come. Every- 
body very cock-a-hoop. 



THE NEW FRONT LINE 

A TURN out, a turn in, and now we're out again, 
and barring three Field Service post cards, I 
believe all that time has gone without my writing 
to you. You must try to forgive me. I can 
assure you things have been happening. There 
hasn't been much idle time. When I last wrote 
we had only begun to talk about the new front 
trench, hadn't we? Things certainly have hummed 
since then. 

The first move was a tour of inspection and 
survey of the proposed new line, by the O.C. of our 
Field Coy. of R.E., with some other officers. 
Somewhat to my surprise — I suppose he really 
ought not to expose himself to that extent — our 
CO. accompanied this party. The next night, 
when the pegs were driven in, definitely marking 
the whole new line, the O.C.R.E. allowed me to go 
with him. The new line, as we marked it out, 
was 760 yards long; from down near The Gut 
right across to what used to be our centre, cutting 

197 



198 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

off the whole big re-entrant and equalising the 
whole sector's distance from the Boche. 

The next day our CO. sent for O.C. Companies, 
and "the Peacemaker" took me along when he 
went, as I'd been over the ground, and he guessed 
the pow-wow would be about the new trench. 
The CO. told us all about it, and what the ideas 
of the authorities were. He said it was the sort 
of job which might possibly prove costly in lives. 
But it had got to be done, and he was of opinion 
that if everyone concerned made up his mind 
never for a moment to relax the care and watchful- 
ness he would use in the first half -hour, the job 
might be done with comparatively few casualties. 
He talked longer than he generally does, and I 
think he felt what he said a good deal. He said 
he never expected to have one moment's anxiety 
as to the bearing of any officer, N.C.O., or man of 
the Battalion in the face of danger. He knew 
very well we were all right on that score. But 
what he did want to impress upon us, as officers, 
was that our duty went a good deal beyond that. 

"I know very well that none of you would ever 
show fear, " he said; " and I think you are satisfied 
that your N.C.O.'s and men will never fail you in 
that respect. But, remember, your greatest asset 



The New Front Line 199 

is the confidence the men have in you. Never 
do anything to endanger that. If you use all the 
care and judgment you can, and if each one of 
your men understands exactly what the job before 
him is, and your influence is such as to prevent 
anyone from losing his head, no matter what 
happens, then the casualty list will be low. Every 
casualty you prevent on a job like this is as good 
as an enemy casualty gained. When we have to 
lose our men, let us lose them fighting, as they 
themselves would choose to go down if go down 
they must. But in this job of the new trench, 
we pit our wits and our coolness and discipline 
and efficiency against those of the Boche; and it's 
your job to see to it that the work is carried 
through at the minimum cost in man-power." 

He said other things, of course, but that was the 
gist of it, and I think we were all impressed. He's 
a martinet all right, is our CO. ; and, as you know, 
his tongue is a two-edged sword. He's as stern a 
man as I ever knew; but, by Gad! he's just, and, 
above and before all else, he is so emphatically 
a man. 

Well, the upshot of our plans was that "A" 
Company was to provide the covering party and 
be responsible for the tactical aspect of the show, 



20o A ••Temporary Gentleman" 

and "C" Company — all miners and farm workers 
— with one Platoon of " D," was to do the digging, 
for a start, anyhow. The R.E. were to run the 
wire entanglement right along the front of the new 
line, and this was to be the first operation. It was 
obvious that as much as possible must be done 
during the first night, since, once he had seen the 
job, as he would directly daylight came, the 
Boche might be relied on to make that line toler- 
ably uncomfortable for anyone working near it 
without cover. 

While we were out of trenches that week oux 
fellows were pretty busy during the first half of 
each night carrying material up to the front line. 
There was a good number of miles of barbed wire to 
go up, with hundreds of iron screw standards for 
the wire, and hundreds more of stakes; a lot of 
material altogether, and I am bound to say I 
think the R.E. arranged it very well. They had 
all their material so put together and stowed 
up at the front as to make for the maximum of 
convenience and the minimum of delay when they 
came to handle it in the open and under fire — 
as men always must be when doing anything in 
No Man's Land. 

Our men were bursting with swank over the 



The New Front Line 



201 



Company's being chosen to act as covering party; 
delighted to think that what they regarded as the 
combatant side of the show was theirs. Indeed, I 
rather think a lot of 'em made up their minds that 
they were going to utilise the opportunity of having 
a couple of hundred men out close to the Boche 
trenches for a real strafe of the men in those 
trenches. "The Peacemaker" had to get 'em 
together and talk very seriously and straight 
about what our responsibilities were in this job. 
This was necessary to make the beggars realise 
that ours was a defensive and not an offensive 
stunt ; in which success or failure depended mainly 
upon our ability to be perfectly silent. 

"AH the scrapping will come later," said "the 
Peacemaker." "We mustn't invite one single 
bullet while we've a couple of hundred men behind 
us using picks and shovels, and working against 
time to get cover. If Boches come along our line, 
it will be our job to strafe 'em with our naked 
fingers if we possibly can. The last thing we'll 
do will be to fire a shot. And the one thing that 
must not happen, not in any case at all — no, not 
if the whole Prussian Guard turns out — is for a 
single Boche in any circumstances whatever to 
get through our line." 



202 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

And that was the basis on which we tackled 
the job. Of course, the O.C. knew better than to 
try to handle his Company as a Company on the 
night. Orders could only be given in whispers, 
you understand. As a matter of fact, in all such 
work, as in night attacks, one must be able to 
rely, not alone on Platoon Sergeants and senior 
N.C.O.'s, but on Corporals and Section Com- 
manders. And if they have not been trained so 
that you can rely on their carrying out instructions 
exactly, one's chances of success are pretty small. 

It was dark soon after five, and by a quarter to 
six we were moving out into the open. One and 
two Platoons went out down Stinking Sap, myself 
in command, and three and four Platoons went out 
from just a little way above Petticoat Lane. I led 
my lot and "the Peacemaker" led the other half- 
Company, the idea being that when he and I met 
we should know that we were in our right position, 
and could stay there. We moved with about 
three paces' interval between men, and kept three 
or four connecting files out on our inside flank 
and a couple on the outer flank; the business of 
the inside men being to steer us at an average 
distance of forty paces to the front of the fore- 
most line of pegs, which was the line to be followed 



The New Front Line 203 

by the barbed- wire entanglements; the line of the 
new trench itself being well inside that again. 

This meant that one flank of our line, just above 
Petticoat Lane, would rest within 150 yards of the 
Boche' front trench, and the other flank about 225 
yards. We had drilled the whole business very 
carefully into the men themselves, as well as the 
Section Commanders and Sergeants. We got out 
on our line without a sound; and then "the Peace- 
maker", made his way back to Stinking Sap to 

report to Captain , of the R.E., that we had 

taken on the duty of protection and were all ready 
for his men to go ahead. He marched his car- 
riers out then, stringing them out along the whole 
line, and the whole of his Company set to work 
putting up the screen of wire entanglements behind 
our line. 

This whole business has given me a lot of respect 
for the R.E.; a respect which, I think, is pretty 
generally felt throughout the Service. The way 
they planned and carried out that wiring job was 
fine. No talk and no finicking once they were in 
the open; every last peg and length of binding 
wire in its right place; sand-bags at hand to fold 
over anything that needed hammering; every 
man told off in advance, not just to make himself 



204 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

as generally useful as he could, but quite definitely 
to screw in standards, or drive in stakes, or fix 
pegs, or carry along the rolls of wire, or strain the 
stays, or lace in the loose stuff, as the case might 
be. Every man knew precisely what his particular 
part was, and went straight at it without a word 
to or from anyone. 

Meanwhile, I was working carefully along from 
end to end of our line, checking up the intervals, 
altering a man's position where necessary, and 
making sure that all our men were properly in 
touch and keeping their right line, watching out 
well and making no sound. Nobody in our lot 
moved, except the officers. All the others lay 
perfectly still. We kept moving up and down in 
front the whole time, except when flares were up 
or machine-gun fire swept across our way, and then, 
of course, we dropped as flat as we could. 

But no machine-gun spoke on that sector, not 
once while the wire was going up. Before half- 
past seven "the Peacemaker" came along to me 
with orders to lead my men off to Stinking Sap. 
The wiring was finished. There had been a 
hundred and fifty men at it, and at that moment 
the last of 'em was entering Stinking Sap — 
casualties, nil. 



The New Front Line 205 

"The Peacemaker" marched his half -Company 
round the end of the wire above Petticoat Lane, 
and I took mine round the end in front of Stinking 
Sap-head. Then we wheeled round to the rear 
of the new wire entanglement and marched out 
again, immediately in rear of it, till "the Peace- 
maker" and I met, as we had previously met in 
front. So we took up our second and final position 
and got down to it exactly as we had done in the 
first position. 

When the O.C. reported that we were in posi- 
tion, "C" Company marched out, half from each 
end of the line, under their own officers, but with 
the O.C.R.E. in command, and his officers helping. 
They were at three yards' interval. There was a 
peg for every man, and the first operation was for 
each man to dig a hole in which he could take 
cover. It had all been thought out beforehand, 
and every man knew just what to do. Their 
instructions were to dig as hard as ever they knew 
how, but silently, till they got cover. All the 
sections were working against each other, and the 
O.C. Company was giving prizes for the first, 
second, and third sections, in order of priority, 
to get underground. 

We couldn't see them, of course, and had all the 



206 A •• Temporary Gentleman •• 

occupation we cared for, thank you, in looking 
after our line. I was glad to find, too, that we 
could only hear them when we listened. They 
were wonderfully quiet. It's a wet clayey soil, 
and they had been carefully drilled never to let 
one tool touch another. I am told they went at 
it like tigers, and that the earth fairly flew from 
their shovels. In our line there wasn't a sound, 
and every man's eyes were glued on his front. 

The evening had been amazingly quiet, nothing 
but desultory rifle fire, and unusually little of 
that. At a quarter to nine a Boche machine-gun 
dead opposite the centre of my half- Company 
began to traverse our line — his real objective, of 
course, being, not our line, but the line of trench, 
the old fire trench, in our rear. I know now that 
at that moment the slowest of "C's" diggers was 
underground. That burst of fire did not get a 
single man; not a scratch. 

A fine rain; very chilling, began to fall, and got 
less fine as time went on. The wind rose a bit, 
too, and drove the rain in gusts in our faces. By 
good luck it was coming from the Boche trenches. 
At half-past ten they sent over ten or twelve 
whizz-bangs, all of which landed in rear of our 
old front line, except two that hit its parapet. 



The New Front Line 207 

Rifle fire was a little less desultory now, but noth- 
ing to write home about. They gave us an oc- 
casional belt or two from their machine-guns, 
but our men were lying flat, and the diggers were 
below ground, so there was nothing to worry about 
in that. 

By half-past eleven I confess I was feeling 
deuced tired. One had been creeping up and 
down the line for over five hours, you know ; but it 
wasn't that. One spends vitality ; it somehow oozes 
out of yOu on such a job. I never wanted anything 
in my life so much as I wanted to get my half- 
Company through that job without casualties. 
And there was one thing I wanted even more than 
that — to make absolutely certain that no prowling 
Boche patrol got through my bit of the line. 

Down on our flank at The Gut there were half a 
dozen little bombing shows between six and mid- 
night, and one bigger scrap, when the Hun exploded 
a mine and made a good try to occupy its crater, 
but, as we learned next day, was hammered out of 
it after some pretty savage hand-to-hand work. 
Farther away on the other flank the Boche artillery 
was unusually busy, and, at intervals, sent over 
bursts of heavy stuff, the opening salvoes of which 
rather jangled one's nerves. You see, "A" 



208 A ••Temporary Gentleman " 

Company could have been extinguished in a very 
few minutes had Boche known enough to go about 
it in the right way. 

If only one enterprising Boche, working on his 
own — a sniper, anybody, — without getting through 
our line just gets near enough to make out that it is 
a line, and then gets back to his own trenches, our 
little game will be up, I thought. It wasn't 
restful. The men were getting pretty stiff, as 
you may guess, lying still in the wet hour after 
hour. 

At half -past two "the Peacemaker" came along 
and whispered to me to take my men in: "Fin- 
ished for to-night." 

I wasn't sorry. I put my senior Sergeant on to 
lead, and myself brought up the rear. I was, of 
course, the last to get into Stinking Sap, and my 
Platoon Sergeant was waiting for me there to tell 
me that not one of our men had a scratch, nor yet 
a single man of "C" Company. One man of No. 
3 Platoon, in "the Peacemaker's" half-Company, 
had a bullet through his shoulder; a Blighty, and 
no more. And that was our record. 

But, look here, I absolutely must stop and 
censor some of the Platoon's letters before turning 
in. I'll write again as soon as ever I can and tell 



The New Front Line 209 

you the rest of it. But — a trench nearly 800 
yards long, wire entanglements in front — casual- 
ties, one man wounded ! Nobody felt much happier 
about it than your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 
14 



A GREAT NIGHT'S WORK 

In my last letter I think I told you all about our 
first night's work on the new trench; how it was 
cut, and the wire entanglements run out, between 
six in the evening and half -past two in the morning ; 
and the casualty list just one man wounded! It 
may not seem much to you, but to us it seemed 
almost miraculous, I think the powers that be 
would have been quite pleased with us if we had 
managed it with, say, thirty or forty casualties. 

Two and a half hours or so later, round about 
five o'clock, although you would have thought we 
should all be pretty tired, as no doubt we were 
(though not so tired, I fancy, as we mostly felt at 
midnight) , everyone was interested in turning out 
for the morning Stand-to. We were all anxious 
to watch Mr. Boche's first glimpse of our night's 
work; not that we could see the expression on the 
faces of the Germans or hear their comments; 
but we could imagine a good deal of it, and wanted 
to see just what happened, anyhow. 

210 



A Great Night's Work 211 

A few sentry groups had been posted along the 
new line when we came in from it at half -past two ; 
but these were withdrawn at the first glimmerings 
of coming dawn, since we could watch the front as 
closely from the original fire-trench, and it was 
possible, of course, that Fritz might just plaster 
the new line with shrap. and whizzes and so on as 
soon as he clapped eyes on it. 

I was watching before the first greying of the 
dawn, from a sniper's post pretty close to the 
Boche line down near the beginning of Petticoat 
Lane. The first thing I made out in the Boche 
line, when the light was still only very faint, was 
the head of a sentry raised well above the parapet 
level, as he stared out at the nearest bit of our 
new wire. I turned half round and grabbed a rifle 
from a man in the trench, but the Boche had dis- 
appeared when I looked round again. Then the 
idea struck me, "Perhaps he'll bring an officer to 
look; a sergeant, anyhow." So I drew a very 
careful bead on that spot, and got my rifle com- 
fortably settled on a mud rest. 

Sure enough, in a couple of minutes that sentry's 
head bobbed up again in the same spot. I held 
my fire, waiting, on the officer theory. And, next 
moment, another head rose beside the sentry's, 



212 A " Temporary Gentleman** 

and came up a good deal less cautiously. I won't 
swear to its being an officer because I couldn't see 
well enough for that. But I think it very likely 
was. Anyhow, I had him most perfectly covered 
when I fired, and they both disappeared the instant 
I had fired, and never showed up again, so I am 
certain I got the second one. He was visible 
down to about his third tunic button, you see, and 
with a resting rifle, I don't think I could miss at 
that range. It wasn't more than 120, if that; 
sights at zero, of course. 

It really was rather thrilling, you know, that 
Stand-to. We had all our machine-guns ready, 
and traversed Fritz's parapet very thoroughly. 
Upon my word, in the fluster of that first daylight 
minute or two, with the new wire under his nose, 
I believe Fritz thought we were going to make a 
dawn attack. I never saw so many Boches expose 
themselves. As a rule, they are a good deal better 
than we are in the matter of keeping out of sight ; 
they take far fewer chances. But they didn't 
seem able to help looking this time, and our sniper 
did pretty well. So did the machine-guns, I 
think; I don't see how they could have helped it. 

Then Boche got his machine-guns to work, and 
poured thousands of rounds all along our front — a 



A Great Night's Work 213 

regular machine-gun bombardment, for which he 
got precisely nothing at all, none of our people 
being exposed. But can't you imagine the excite- 
ment in the Boche line ? The evening before they 
had seen our line exactly as usual. In the night 
they had apparently heard and suspected nothing. 
And now, with the first morning light, they saw a 
line of brand-new wire entanglement and a new 
trench line, that must have looked most amazingly 
close to them, and actually was in parts an ad- 
vance of 400 yards from the old line. And then 
the length of it, you know — just on 800 yards. It 
certainly must have startled 'em. 

We quite thought they'd start lambasting Old 
Harry out of the new line at any moment; but 
they didn't. I guess they had sense enough to 
conclude that we had nobody out there. But 
during the forenoon Master Boche registered on 
the new line at several points; about twenty 
rounds of whizzes and H. E., just to encourage us 
with regard to our work for that night, I suppose. 
And beyond that he didn't go — dignified silence, 
you know. But I bet he was pretty mad to think 
of all he'd missed during the night. In the after- 
noon Fritz sent a couple of 'planes up, I dare say 
with cameras, to get a record of the new line. 



214 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

But our Archibalds in the rear made it so hot for 
them I don't think they can have got any snap- 
shots. 

When "A" Company filed out at six o'clock 
that night to take up protective duty along the 
new wire, as before, while the new trench was 
proceeded with, I think we might have been excused 
for feeling a bit creepy. I can't say how the men 
felt, but I confess I. had made up my mind that my 
own chances of getting back were tolerably thin. 
One must move about a good bit to do one's job 
properly, and keep touch with a hundred men 
strung out over 300 yards of ground in pitch dark- 
ness. As a matter of fact, it was barely dark 
when we filed out. We daren't leave it a minute 
later, in case a strong Boche patrol should have 
worked inside our line, and been waiting for the 
working party when it came out with bombs. We 
simply had to be beforehand with 'em; and there 
was no getting away from the fact that the Boche 
had had all day in which to study this new line 
of ours and make his plans. I say I don't know 
how our men were feeling. I do know they were 
cracking little jokes themselves about it before 
we left the sap. 

' ' This way for motor ambulances ! " ' ' Change 



A Great Night's Work 215 

here for Blighty and the Rest Cure!" "Where'll 
you have yours, matey?" I heard plenty of 
remarks like that as I worked my way down 
Stinking Sap to get to the head of my lot before 
we moved out. 

"You'll be all right," said one of mine to a "C" 
Company man as he entered the sap. "Mister 
blooming Fritz can't get at you with 'A' Com- 
pany out in front, you take it from me. We'll 
twist fyis tail properly if he does come." The 
"C" men were for digging again, you know. 

It's impossible for an officer to feel shaky, how- 
ever slight his experience, when he has men like 
ours to work with. 

It wasn't exactly a proper trench that "C" 
Company went to work in that night. There were 
bits that were almost finished; and then, again, 
there were other lengths where it was only a chain 
of holes, linked together by bits a yard or two 
long, in which the surface had been shifted, just to 
mark out the trace of the new line. But every 
man was able to get into cover right away, even 
in the worst bits, because of these holes, and then, 
being in a hole, his job was to cut his way along into 
the next hole just as quick as his strength would 
allow him. The trench was cut narrow, you 



216 A "Temporary Gentleman ** 

know; not a quarter the width of the old trenches 
we have occupied. This doesn't make for comfort 
in getting to and fro; but it does give far safer 
cover from every kind of projectile, and especially 
from the deadly shrap. and the slippy whizz. 

While "C" slogged away at making connection 
right through, we lay out by the wire, as we had 
done the night before, and I crept up and down our 
line. There was no rain, and the night was so 
quiet that we could hear every little move among 
the diggers much more plainly than on the night 
before. I wondered if the Boches could hear it. 
They sent us little bursts of machine-gun fire 
now and again, such as they send throughout 
every night; and there was the normal amount of 
rifle fire and the normal number of flares and 
different kinds of lights going up from the enemy 
lines. Our men all lay as still as mutton, and 
when the lights rose near our way, or the M.G. 
fire came, I naturally kept very still. 

Once I distinctly made out a figure moving very 
slowly and cautiously outside the wire. I should 
like to have fired, and, better still, to have been 
able to get quickly and silently through the wire 
and on to that moving figure, getting to grips, as 
we did with that German sniper not long since, 



A Great Night's Work 217 

without a sound. But there was no opening in 
the wire near; and with regard to firing, my orders 
were not to draw fire by expending a single round 
unnecessarily, and to fire only in defence. What 
I did was to get the O.C.'s permission shortly 
afterwards to take three men and patrol beyond 
the front of the wire. But we found nothing. No 
doubt I had seen one member of a Boche obser- 
vation patrol on the prowl to find out what we 
were doing; and if only I could have got him 
it would have been excellent. From that time 
on we kept a continuous patrol going in front 
of the wire. 

Then came a salvo of four whizz-bangs, all 
landing fairly near the new trench ; three in rear of 
it, and one most infernally close in front of us. I 
suppose we all told ourselves the ball was just 
about to begin. But nothing happened for over 
an hour. Then came nine shells in quick succes- 
sion, one of which, on my left, robbed my half- 
Company of four men, one killed and three 
wounded. The rest accomplished nothing. Then 
silence again, followed by occasional bursts of 
M.G. and the usual sort of rifle fire. Corporal 
Lane, of No. 2 Platoon, stopped a M.G. bullet 
with his left shoulder, I regret to say, and one 



218 A "Temporary Gentleman " 

man in the trench — "C" Company — was killed 
by a bullet through the head. 

With every little burst of fire, one braced oneself 
for the big strafe that we naturally felt must 
come. It seemed the Boche was playing with us 
as a cat plays with a mouse. "I wonder what 
devilry he's got up his sleeve?" We probably 
all asked ourselves that question fifty times. 

At two o'clock there wasn't a break anywhere in 
the new line. It was a connected trench through- 
out, and nowhere less than six feet deep, with two 
communicating trenches leading back to our 
original front line. At three o'clock the word 
came along that the working party had been 
withdrawn, and that I was to take my men in. 
As before, we left a few sentry groups, to be 
relieved at dawn by fresh sentries, since the new 
line was now to be guarded by day and manned 
by night. 

And that was the end of it. I got my men 
safely in. Half an hour later the Boche sent over 
another ten or dozen shells on the new line, and 
once again before dawn he did the same, with the 
usual periodical bursts of M.G. fire and dropping 
rifle fire during the rest of the time. And nothing 
more. Wasn't it extraordinary, when he had had 



A Great Night's Work 219 

a whole day to think about it, and must have 
known we should be at work there that night? 
Possibly, however, in his crafty way, he assumed 
we should not go near the new line that second 
night for fear of strafing, and held his hand for 
that reason. And, possibly, our General assumed 
he'd think that, and acted accordingly. But 
there it is. We got our work done at next to no 
cost. 

I was going to tell you about the rumours as to 
our push to straighten out the line, but my time's 
up. That will have to wait for my next letter. 
We are having an easy time now, but there were 
no free minutes last week. You'll hear again 
soon, from your 

li Temporary Gentleman'' 



THE COMING PUSH 

You are quite right in saying that I don't feel 
much interest in political affairs at home these 
days. The fact is, we do not often see the news- 
papers, and when we see them there isn't much 
time for really reading them or giving much con- 
sideration to what they say. The war news is 
interesting, of course; but all this endless tarky- 
talky business, why, I can hardly tell you how 
queerly it strikes us out here. You see, we are 
very close to concrete realities all the time, and to 
us it seems the talky-talky people are most amaz- 
ingly remote from realities of any kind. They 
seem to us to be very much interested in shadows, 
notions, fads, fancies, and considerations of interests 
which we think were washed out of existence at 
the very beginning of the war. They even seem 
able to strive mightily and quarrel virulently over 
the discussion of the principles and abstractions 
involved in things they propose to do when the 
war is over! 

220 



The Coming Push 221 

M-m-m-m-m-m ! Seems to us the thing is to get 
it over, and in the right way. No, we are not 
much interested in the political situation. The 
tangible actualities of the situation out here 
seem to us very pressing; pressing enough to 
demand all the energies and all the attention; 
every atom of the strength of all the people of 
the British race; without any wastage over more 
remote things, abstractions, things ante and post 
bellum. 1 Here in France I can assure you men, 
women, and children are all alike in that they have 
no life outside the war. Every thought, every act, 
everything is in and for the war. The realities 
are very close here. 

One thing in that last letter of yours especially 
pleases me. "We have now got to the point in 
England at which all the people of both sexes 
who are worth their salt are busy at war work of 
one kind or another." 

That's excellent. Well, now rope in the ones 
who are not ' ' worth their salt . ' ' You'll find they're 
all right, once they're roped in. I don't believe 
in this idea of some people not being worth their 
salt; not in England, anyhow. The stock is too 
good. You know the type of hoodlum who, with 
licks of hair plastered over his forehead, seems to 



222 A •• Temporary Gentleman" 

spend his days leaning against a lamp-post. The 
fellow I mean has a perfectly beastly habit of spit- 
ting over everything in sight ; when riding on top of 
a 'bus, for instance. Despised by decent men, he's 
a real terror to decent women. Same type, I 
suppose, as the Apache of Paris. Every big 
city breeds 'em. 

Well, all I want to tell you about this gentleman 
is, never to run away with the notion that he can't 
be worth his salt. All he needs is to be taught 
the meaning of authority. It's only a matter of 
months; even weeks. With my own eyes I have 
watched the process at work. Nobody will ever 
again be able to delude me about it. In a country 
like ours there are no people "not worth their 
salt." The worst type of man we've got only 
needs a few months in a Battalion like ours, during 
the training period, to learn the meaning of 
authority, and, by means of discipline, to have his 
latent manhood developed. It's there all right. 
Only he'll never develop it of his own accord. 
Authority must be brought to bear. The Army 
method is the quickest and best. In a few months 
it makes these fellows men, and thundering good 
men at that. Worth their salt! They're worth 
their weight in — well, to take something real and 



The Coming Push 223 

good, say in 'baccy and cartridges — real men and 
real fighters. 

Out here in billets, we get a deal more informa- 
tion about things generally than ever reaches us 
in the line. All the rumours come our way, and 
among 'em, here and there, I dare say, hints of 
the truth. We know that out there in the new 
trench we cut no dug-outs are being made. There's 
no evidence of any intention to inhabit that new 
front line. It is just fully manned by night and 
held by a few sentry groups in the day. (It's a 
deuce of a job getting along it by night when it's 
full of men. Being kept so narrow, for safety's 
sake, there are not many places where you can 
pass men, so you have to get along somehow over 
their heads or between their legs. Oh, it's great 
going on a wet night !) And this, in our eyes, is 
proof positive of the truth of the rumour which 
says we are to use it almost immediately as a 
jumping-off place, in a push designed to strengthen 
and straighten our front line by cutting off that 
diabolical corner of the Boche line opposite The 
Gut; to wash out The Gut, in fact, altogether, 
putting it behind our front line, with all its blood- 
soaked craters. 

I don't think I ought to write much about it, 



224 A 4i Temporary Gentleman** 

though I suppose the Censor won't mind so long as 
I mention no places or names to indicate the part 
of the front we're on. But, in effect, if we can 
take several hundred yards of Boche trenches 
here, the gain to us, apart altogether from strategic 
considerations, will be equivalent to at least a 
mile. It's much more than just that, really, 
because it means getting a very advantageous 
and commanding position in exchange for a very 
exposed and deadly one, depriving Boche of a 
great advantage and gaining a great advantage 
for ourselves. Even the lesser of the two possible 
schemes, concerning less than 200 yards of Boche 
front, would give us all that. But the general 
opinion seems to be that we are to tackle the 
larger scheme, involving the seizure of a good 
mile or more of Boche front. We all think 
we know, and we none of us know anything, 
really. 

But I must clear out. We have a new issue of 
improved gas-helmets, and I've got to see to 
dishing 'em out. Then every man will have two 
anti-gas helmets and one pair of anti-lachrymatory 
gas goggles. We are also renewing our emergency, 
or "iron," ration — and that all looks like a push, 
and is therefore exhilarating. 



The Coming Push 225 

Later. 

Great and glorious news ! The push is a fact. I 
mustn't say which day, and, just in case this letter 
fell into wrong hands, I think I'll hold it back, and 
not post just yet. The main thing is we are to 
push ; and we are jolly well going to wipe out that 
Boche corner. It is the lesser of the two schemes — 
a local affair pure and simple, so I suppose you'll 
learn next to nothing about it from dispatches. 
You know our British way in the matter of official 
dispatches. The British have no shop window 
at all. One ought to be glad of it, I suppose. 
Ours is the safer, better, more dignified way, no 
doubt, and certainly never raises hopes doomed 
to possible disappointment. At the back of my 
mind I approve it all right. (Which should be 
comforting to the G.O.C. in C.) But, as touching 
ourselves, one cannot help wishing the dispatches 
would give you news of our show. Of course 
they won't. 

"The night was quiet on the remainder of the 
Front." "Some elements of trenches changed 

hands in the neighbourhood of , the advantage 

being with us." That's the sort of thing. At 
least, I hope it'll read that way. It will, if "A" 
Company can make it so. 
15 



226 A ** Temporary Gentleman" 

I'm particularly glad we had that turn in Petti- 
coat Lane, you know. Now that I think we shall 
never occupy it again as a front line — by the time 
you get this, please the pigs, it'll be well behind our 
front line, and we'll be snugly over the rise where 
the Boche now shelters — I don't mind admitting 
to you that it's a heart-breaking bit of line. There's 
no solid foothold anywhere in it, and there's 
next to no real cover. It's a vile bit of trench, 
which we never should have occupied if we'd had 
any choice in those early days when the Boche 
first dug himself in opposite, and the French, 
having no alternative, scratched in here. For 
our sins we know every inch of it now, and, thanks 
to good glasses and long hours of study, I think I 
know the opposite lines pretty well — the lines I 
hope we shall be in. 

Our fellows are queer, you know. Perhaps I've 
told you. Any kind of suffering and hardship they 
have to endure they invariably chalk up to the 
account against Mr. Boche. There's a big black 
mark against him for our spell in Petticoat Lane, 
and, by Jupiter! he'll find he'll have to pay for 
every mortal thing our chaps suffered there; every 
spoiled or missed meal; even lost boots, sore feet, 
and all such details. Our chaps make jokes about 



The Coming Push 227 

these things, and, if they're bad enough, make 
believe they almost enjoy them while they last. 
But every bit of it goes down in the account against 
Fritz; and if "A" Company gets the chance to be 
after him, by Gad ! he'll have to skip ! He really 
will. 

I'm not going to risk giving away military infor- 
mation by telling you any more now. It will all 
be over, and Cut-Throat Alley will be behind us 
when next I write. And, understand, you are 
not to worry in the least bit about me, because I 
promise you I'll get through. I should know if I 
were not going to ; at least, I think I should. But 
I feel perfectly certain we shall bring this thing off 
all right anyhow; and so, even if I did chance to 
go down, you wouldn't grieve about that, would 
you? because you'd know that's the way any fellow 
would like to go down, with his Company bringing 
it off; and, mind you, a thing that's going to make 
a world of difference to all the hundreds of good 
chaps who will hold this sector of the front before 
the war's over. 

We've got a mighty lot to wipe out in this little 
push. It isn't only such scraps of discomfort as 
we suffered, nor yet the few men we lost there. 
But, French and British, month in and month out, 



228 A "Temporary Gentleman ** 

for many a long day and night, we've been using 
up good men and true in that bloody, shell-torn 
corner. Why, there's not a yard of its churned- 
up soil that French and English men haven't 
suffered on. We've all that to wipe out; all that, 
and a deal more that I can't tell you about. I'll 
only tell you that I mean to get through it all right. 
Every man in the Battalion means real business — 
just as much as any of the chaps who fought under 
Nelson and Wellington, believe me. So, whatever 
you do, be under no sort of anxiety about your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 

P.S. — Seeing that you and I, and all our lot, 
never have known anything about military matters 
before this war came, I think it may interest you, as 
it interests me, to know that I have never seen the 
Company as a whole jollier, or in higher spirits 
than it is with this job before it; and, do you 
know, I never felt happier myself, never. I feel 
this makes it worth while to be alive and fit; 
more worth while than it ever was in civil life 
before the war. 



FRONT LINE TO HOSPITAL 

Perhaps this address will be quite a shock to you 
if you know what it means. So I hasten to say 
that I am perfectly all right, really. "Clearing 
Station" — perhaps that won't have the ominous 
look to you that "Hospital" would, though it 
means the same thing. But the point is, I am all 
right. I told you I'd get through, and I have. 
The fact that I'm lying in bed here — in luxurious 
comfort — is only an incident. I am quite safe 
and perfectly all right. 

They tell me here that directly an officer is 
wounded information to that effect is sent home to 
his people. Well, I hope you will get this word 
from me first, and accept my assurance that there's 
nothing to worry about. These good folk here 
will put me as right as ninepence in no time, and I 
hope very shortly to be back with the Company 
and in the new line. 

It was shrapnel, you know, and got me in the 
left leg and a bit in the right arm just when I was 

229 



230 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

most wanting the use of both of 'em. I hope they 
haven't told you I'm going to lose my leg or 
anything, because I'm not. The surgeon here — a 
first-rate chap and a splendid surgeon — has told 
me all about it, and my leg will very soon be as 
good as ever. 

This is just a line to let you know I am perfectly 
all right. I'll write and tell you all about it to- 
morrow. 

I wonder whether the dispatches will have told 
you anything. The push was splendid. We've 
got that corner, and The Gut is well behind our 
front line now. 



My letter of yesterday will have assured you 
that I am all right; nothing at all to worry about. 
I meant to have written you fully to-day about the 
push. But we've been busy. The surgeon's been 
cleaning me up — getting rid of useless souvenirs, 
you know; and it seems I'm better keeping pretty 
still and quiet to-day. Shall be out and about all 
the quicker, you see. This is a perfectly heavenly 
place, where you don't hear a vestige of gun-fire, 
and everything is sweet and clean, quiet and easy ; 
no responsibility, no anything but comfort and 



Front Line to Hospital 231 

ease. What a luxurious loaf I'm having! I'll 
write to-morrow. 



I'm going ahead like a house afire; but so con- 
foundedly lazy, you'd hardly believe it. I suppose 
this pencil will be legible, though it hardly looks 
it to me. As I say, I'm too lazy for words; simply 
wallowing in comfort and cleanliness. Thought I 
would just pencil a line now, so that you would 
know I was perfectly all right and then I can write 
properly to-morrow. 



Another lazy day. I really ought to be at work, 
you know, so well and fit I am. But I just laze 
in this delightful bed, and watch the busy orderlies 
and sisters flitting to and fro, as though I were in 
a dream and other folk had to do all the world's 
work. The good old "Peacemaker" has come in 
to see me, and is writing this for me; chiefly because 
of my laziness, and partly that I like to spare you 
the work of deciphering the hieroglyphics I make 
with my left hand. The right arm is pretty good, 
you know, but it seems I'll get it entirely sound 
again rather quicker by not using it just now ; and 



232 A •'Temporary Gentleman" 

it's rather jolly to have one's O.C. Company 
working for one in this way. 

He says that while I was about it I was a duffer 
not to get a real Blighty, and so have a holiday 
and come and see you all. As a fact, I've no 
doubt he's profoundly grateful that he will not 
be robbed of my invaluable services for long. 
"A" Company was relieved last night by a 

Company of the ; in our new trenches, you 

know; the trenches that used to belong to Mister 
Boche; so our fellows are having a bit of a rest, 
I'm glad to say. Not the luxurious rest I'm 
having, of course; but something to be going on 
with. 

I meant to tell you a whole lot of things, but 
for the laziness that makes me so greedy for naps 
and dozes. Also, they say visitors have to leave 
now, and "the Peacemaker" has a good way to 
ride. I'll write properly to-morrow. Meantime 
"the Peacemaker" is good enough to say he 
will write you to-night particulars as to how 
I got my scratches; so I won't ask him to 
write any more now. He will carry this on 
himself when he gets back to-night — while I 
laze and sleep. 



Front Line to Hospital 233 

As promised, I am adding a few lines to this 
for our good friend. I have not yet told him, but 
as a fact I am the only unwounded officer in "A" 
Company at the moment, and we were relieved 
last night in order that we might reorganise. 
Lieutenant Morgan — "Taffy" — was killed, I 
grieve to say, in the beginning of the advance, and 
our casualties for the Company were thirty-two 
killed and seventy-eight wounded. It's a terrible 
price, of course, but you will understand that a big 
loss was inevitable in our Company, when I tell 
you that we not only led the advance, but led it 
from the notorious Petticoat Lane, where the front 
is extraordinarily difficult to cross. We were 
very proud to be chosen for the lead, and com- 
pared with the net gain for the line, our loss is 
small, really. Indeed, if the entire casualties in 
the whole advance are weighed up against the 
position won, I believe I am right in saying that 
the cost was remarkably low. The gain in the line 
is immense, and there is not the smallest chance of 
the Boches taking it back again. Although our 
bombardment knocked his trenches about pretty 
badly — they were very strong trenches indeed, 
to begin with, very strongly placed and favourably 
situated — since our occupation we have worked 



234 A •* Temporary Gentleman" 

day and night to make of the corner practically 
a fortified position, and one from which we can 
punish the Boche pretty severely on both flanks. 
I think this gain will lead to other gains before 
long in this sector. Our information is that the 
Boche casualties were very heavy. However, I 
did not mean to run on like this with regard to 
the military aspect. It is our friend you will want 
to hear about. 

Now, in the first place, I should like to De 
allowed to say what you perhaps have guessed: 
that he is a very fine and a very valuable officer. 
I am not a bad judge, not only because I command 
his Company, but because, unlike himself, I am 
not quite without military knowledge of the kind 
that came before the war, having a good many 
years behind me of service as a Volunteer, and 
then as a Territorial, down to within seven months 
of the beginning of the war when I joined this 
Service Battalion. And I have no hesitation in 
saying that our friend is a fine and valuable officer. 
I know that a big share of any credit due for the 
fine training and discipline of our Company — 
which is, I think, admitted to be the crack Com- 
pany of the best Battalion in the Brigade — is due, 
not to me, but to the Commander of our No. I 



Front Line to Hospital 235 

Platoon. It is a very great loss to me to have him 
laid aside now; but I am so thankful his life is 
spared that I have no regret to waste over his 
being wounded. But I do very sincerely hope 
that he will be able to return to us, to the re- 
organised "A" Company, for I have never met an 
officer I would sooner have beside me. The men 
of the Platoon, and, indeed, of the whole Company, 
are devoted to him; and I regard it as little short 
of marvellous that in so comparatively short a time 
a man who had never had even the slightest hint 
of military training should have been able to 
become, all round, so efficient, so well posted 
technically, and, above all, so confident and abso- 
lutely so successful a leader of men. For that 
has been his greatest asset: that his men will go 
anywhere with him, do anything for him, trust 
him without the slightest reserve or doubt. 

You know more about his character than I do, 
but I venture to say that the character you know 
has been wonderfully developed by the war and 
by his military training. He may have been the 
most lovable of men before, but I cannot believe 
that he was anything like so strong a man or so 
able a man. Confidence, fearlessness, decisiveness 
— strength, in fact; these qualities, I am sure, 



236 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

have developed greatly in him since he joined. I 
sometimes think there is nothing more wonderful 
in all this wonderful period of the war than the 
amazing development it has brought in the 
thousands of young Englishmen who now are 
capable and efficient officers, loved and trusted 
by their men, and as able in every way as any 
officers the British Army ever had, although 
the great majority of them have no military tradi- 
tion behind them, and before August, 19 14, had 
no military training. That is wonderful, and I am 
convinced that no other race or nation in the wide 
world could have produced the same thing. The 
men, fine as they are, might have been produced 
elsewhere, or something like them. But this 
apparently inexhaustible supply of fine and efficient 
officers — no, I think not. 

The newspapers will have told you something 
of our little push, and I will not trouble you with 
any technical detail. We advanced over a very 
narrow front after a short but intense bombard- 
ment. Our friend led the right half of "A" 
because I did not want to rob his own Platoon of 
his immediate influence. His is No. I. The pace 
was hot, despite the torn and treacherous nature 
of the ground. The right half did even better than 



Front Line to Hospital 237 

rny half, and stormed the first Boche line with extra- 
ordinary dash and vigour. It seemed as though 
nothing could stop their impetuosity; and in the 
midst of the tremendous din I caught little waves 
of their shouting more than once. 

Our friend had crossed the first line, and success- 
fully led his men to the very edge of the second 
line, shouting to his men to join him in taking it, 
when the shell burst that brought him down. The 
same shell must have laid some Boches low, if that 
is any consolation. Not that we need any con- 
solation. I feel sure you will agree with me in 
that. 

But I want to tell you that the wounds in the 
right arm — not serious, I am thankful to say — 
were not from the same shell. They came in the 
neighbourhood of the first Boche line. That same 
right arm (after it was wounded), carrying a 
loaded stick, knocked up a Boche bayonet that 
was due to reach the chest of a man in No. 1 
Platoon and then served to support the same 
man on the parapet of the Boche trench — he was 
already wounded — for a few moments till a 
stretcher-bearer got him. It was not possible 
for our friend to stay with him, of course. A few 
seconds later he was leading his men full pelt 



238 A ** Temporary Gentleman ** 

towards the second line ; and all that after his first 
wound. I thought you would like to know that. 
Our CO. knows it, and I venture to hope it will 
find mention in dispatches. 

And now with regard to his condition. Whilst 
he is not quite so forward as he thinks — there is, 
of course, no question of his coming back to duty 
in a few days, as he fancies — there is, I think, no 
cause whatever for anxiety. In fact, the M.O. at 
the Clearing Station assured me of so much. His 
general health is excellent ; nothing septic has inter- 
vened; it is simply a question of a little time. The 
worst that is likely to happen is that the left leg 
may be permanently a shade shorter than the 
right, and it is hoped this may be averted. His 
Company — all that is left of us- — will be very 
sincerely glad to see him back again. Meantime 
we rejoice, as I am sure you will, in the manner, 
the distinction, of his fall, in the certainty of his 
enjoying the rest he has earned so well, and in the 
prospect of his recovery. 



THE PUSH AND AFTER 

The Battalion being now out of the line, the O.C. 
Company has kindly sent my batman along to 
me here — you remember my batman, Lawson, on 
Salisbury Plain — and he is writing this for me, so 
that I can preserve my present perfect laziness. I 
point this out by way of accounting for the superior 
neatness of the handwriting, after my illegible 

scrawls. Lawson was a clerk at 's works 

before the war, and, as you perceive, has a top- 
hole "hand of write." 

I got rather a fright, as I lay dreaming here, 
half awake and half asleep, at six o'clock this morn- 
ing. An orderly came along with a blue ticket and 
a big safety-pin, like those the Highlanders use in 
their petticoats, and pinned his label on the bottom 
of my counterpane. 

"Hallo!" says I; "what's this? Are they 
putting me up for sale?" 

Mentally, I began to describe myself for the 
catalogue. (How strong are the habits of civil 

239 



240 A "Temporary Gentleman •• 

life!) "One full-size, extra heavy Temporary 
Officer and Gentleman; right arm and left leg 
slightly chipped., the whole a little shop- worn, but 
otherwise as new. Will be sold absolutely without 
reserve to make room for new stock." (They 
have to keep as many beds as possible vacant in 
Clearing Stations, you know.) 

The orderly just grinned and faded away like 
the Cheshire cat. A Sister came along shortly 
afterwards, and I asked her the meaning of my 
blue label. 

"Oh! that," she said, very casually, "that's the 
evacuation card." 

I am to be evacuated, like a pulverised trench, a 
redoubt that has become useless or untenable. 
Jolly, isn't it ? Seriously, I was a good deal worried 
about this, until I had seen the M. O., because 
I had an idea that once one was evacuated out of 
the Divisional area, one was automatically struck 
off the strength of one's unit, in which case, good- 
ness knows when, if ever, I should see my own 
"A" Company again. But the M.O. tells me it's 
all right, so long as one remains in France. One 
is only struck off on leaving France, and when 
that happens one can never be sure which Battalion 
of the Regiment one will return to. So there's 



The Push and After 241 

nothing to worry about. It's only that these 
Clearing Stations have to keep plenty of vacant 
accommodation ready for cases fresh out of the 
line; and so fellows like me, who are supposed to 
require a bit more patching up than can be given 
in two or three days, have to be evacuated to one 
or other of the base hospitals. Hence the label, 
which makes of your Temporary Gentleman an 
1 ' evacuation case. ' ' 

It's uncertain when I shall be moved, or to which 
base, so I cannot give you a new address for letters. 
The generosity, the kindness, the skill, and the 
unwearying attentiveness and consideration shown 
one in this place could not possibly be improved on ; 
but their official reticence in the matter of giving 
one any information regarding one's insignificant 
self, future movements, and so on, can only be 
described as godlike. I shall always associate it 
in my mind with a smile of ineffable benevolence 
(also rather godlike), as who should say, with 
inexhaustible patience, "There, there, my little 
man; there, there." And that's all. Perhaps 
it's good for us, taken, as medicine must be, with 
childlike trust and faith. We must hope so. 

Come to think of it, there is a hint in the gentle 

air of this place — never torn by shot or shell, or 
16 



242 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

penetrated by even the faintest odour of defunct 
Boches in No Man's Land — of a general conspiracy 
of reticence. It has infected mine own hitherto 
trusted batman (who presumes to chuckle as he 
writes these lines at my dictation) , whose professed 
ignorance, regarding most points upon which I 
have this morning sought information, suggests 
that I have in the past consistently overrated 
his intelligence and general competence. It is 
clearly very desirable that I should get back to 
my Platoon as soon as possible. 

Lying here at mine ease, I think a great deal; 
but of the quality of my thinking I fear there is 
little to be said that is favourable. Perhaps the 
medicine I take so trustfully has contained some 
of the soporific stuff of dreams, and that is why 
the pain in my leg has been so trifling since the 
first day here. I feel my thoughts stirring in my 
mind ; but they move in a swaying, dreamy fashion, 
as though they were floating in, say golden syrup, 
and were not really interested in getting out of it. 
I wanted to tell you all about our push, but, do 
you know, though it was not very many days ago, 
it seems already extraordinarily remote, so far as 
the details are concerned, and I am hazy as to 
what I have told you and what I have not told. 



The Push and After 243 

One thing stands out so clearly in my otherwise 
treacly mind that I feel I never, never shall forget 
it; and that is the sensation of the moment when 
the order reached us to advance. We had been 
a long, time waiting for it, even before our bom- 
bardment began, and when it came — But, 
although the sensation is very clear to me, I'm 
not at all sure I can convey any idea of it to you. 
I've just asked Lawson what he felt like when it 
came; but the conspiracy of reticence, or some- 
thing, leads him to say he doesn't know. I found 
myself muttering something at the moment, and 
he says he did, too. That's something of a coinci- 
dence. He believes the actual words he muttered 
were: "What ho!" But that's not exactly 
illuminating, is it? 

I believe my thought, as we scrambled over the 
parapet was that now, at last, we were going to 
wipe Petticoat Lane off the map as a front line. 
Good-bye to this hole! That was the idea, I 
think. We did so hate that bit of line, with its 
quicksand craters in front, and the sodden lowness 
that made it a sort of pocket for the receipt of 
every kind of explosive the Boche liked to lob in 
onus. 

The struggle through the craters, before we got 



244 A ••Temporary Gentleman •• 

to the first Boche line, was pretty beastly, and, I 
am afraid, cost us rather dear, although we got to 
the near lip of the craters before the punishment 
began, thanks to a quick start and the fine accuracy 
of our gunners in their curtain fire. You know the 
sort of thing that happens in nightmares, when 
each of your feet weighs a ton and a half, at the 
moment when speed is the only thing to save you 
from the most hideous kind of spiflication. Get- 
ting through the craters was like that. 

Our good time began when the craters were 
passed, and there was nothing but Boche trenches 
in front of us. Then it was we began to feel 
the jolly feelings youVe read about; the glori- 
ous exhilaration of the charge. And, really, it 
wouldn't be possible to exaggerate about that. 
You can take it from me that the most highly 
coloured chromo-lithographs can't overdo that, in 
the essential spirit of the thing. Their detail is 
pretty groggy, of course — no waving plumes, gay 
colours, flashing swords, and polished top-boots, 
you know. My goodness, no! We were all the 
colour of the foul clay we'd come from — all over. 
But the spirit of it! It's perfectly hopeless 
for me to try to tell you, especially in a letter. 
They say they pump spirits and drugs into the 



The Push and After 245 

Bodies before they leave their trenches. No drug 
and no champagne, even of the choicest, could have 
given us any more exhilaration, I fancy, than one 
felt in that dash from the craters to the first Boche 
line. . Heavens ! but it was the real thing ; real, real, 
real; that's what it was, more than anything else. 
Made you feel you'd never been really and fully 
alive till then. Seven-leagued boots, and all that 
kind of thing, you know. The earth seemed to 
fly under your feet. I can see the dirty, earth- 
smeared faces in that Boche trench now. (They 
were scuffling and scrambling out from the dug- 
outs, where they'd sheltered from our bombard- 
ment, to their fire-steps.) They seemed of no 
more importance than so many Aunt Sallies or 
Dutch dolls. Things like that to stop us ! Absurd ! 

And how one whooped ! I was fairly screaming 
"'A' Company:" at the very top of my voice as 
we jumped into that trench. The man on my 
left was Corporal Slade (Lance- Sergeant, I should 
say) and, as we reached their parapet I could hear 
him yelling beside my ear, through all the roar of 
the guns: "Hell! Give 'em hell! Give 'em 
hell, boys ! ' ' Most outrageous ! 

In the trench it was a sort of a football scrum 
glorified ; oh ! very much glorified. Most curiously, 



246 A "Temporary Gentleman ** 

the thing passing through my mind then was "the 
Peacemaker's" old gag, apropos of the use of his 
trench dagger, you know: "When you hear that 
cough, you can pass on to the next Boche. Get 
him in the right place, and three inches of the steel 
will do. Don't waste time over any more. ' ' Queer 
wasn't it? 

Galloping across the next stretch — by the way, it 
was the very devil getting out over the Boche 
parados, so high and shaly. A fellow grabbed 
my right ankle when I was half-way up ; the very 
thing I'd always dreaded in dreams of the trenches, 
and, by Gad! if I didn't kick out you must let 
me know about it. I'd sooner have had a bayonet 
thrust any day than the ram of my field boot that 
chap got in his face. The next stretch, to the 
Boche second line, yes! The champagney feeling 
was stronger than ever then, because one felt that 
front line was smashed. Sort of crossing the 
Rhine, you know. One was on German soil, 
so to say. My hat, what scores to pay! 

And mixed up with the splendid feeling of the 
charge itself — by long odds the finest feel I ever 
had in my life — there was a queer, worrying little 
thought, too. I knew some of our men were 
dropping, and — "Damn it, I ought to be 



The Push and After 247 

doing something to save those chaps." That 
was the thought. It kind of stung; sort of feeling 
I ought to have some knowledge I had failed to 
acquire. They're your men, you ought to know. 
That sort of feeling. But I don't think it slowed 
one's stride at all. The champagne feeling was 
the main thing. I was absolutely certain we were 
bringing it off all right. The Boche guns were 
real enough; but their men didn't seem to me 
to count. 

Queer thing about the wire in front of that second 
line. It wasn't anything like so good or extensive 
as front-line wire, and I dare say our guns had 
knocked a good deal of the stuffing out of it. 
Still, there was a lot left, more than I expected 
for a second line. Do you know, "A" Company 
went through it as though it had been paper. 
It was a glorious thing that. You know how 
gingerly one approaches barbed wire or anything 
like that ; a thorn hedge, if you like. And you've 
seen how fellows going into the sea to bathe, at 
low tide, will gallop through the rows of little 
wavelets where the water's shallow; feet going 
high and arms waving, the men themselves 
whooping for the fun of the thing. That's exactly 
how our chaps went through that wire. I'll 



248 A "Temporary Gentleman'* 

guarantee nobody felt a scratch from it. And yet 
my breeches and tunic were in ribbons from the 
waist down when I got to the field ambulance, and 
from the waist to the knee 111 carry the pattern of 
that wire for some time to come. Might have 
been swan's-down for all we knew about it. 

And then, unfortunately, on the parapet of the 
second line I got my little dose, and was laid out. 
Goodness knows, that shell certainly laid out some 
Boches as well as me. Ill say this for 'em, they 
met us on the parapet all right. But "A" Com- 
pany's business was urgent. We had scores to 
settle from Petticoat Lane and other choice spots ; 
and the Kaiser's got no one who could stop us. 
I do wish I could have seen it through. I know 
they tried hard to counter us out of that line. 
But they couldn't shift old "A," who did just as 
well when I dropped out as before — the beggars! 
Lawson tells me I was yelling like a madman on 
that parapet for some time before I went to sleep, 
you know: "I'll be there in a minute!" — there 
in a minute ! How absurd ! 

Next thing I knew I was being lifted out of a 
trench stretcher, right away back at Battalion 
Headquarters in the old support line. Then the 
good old Batt'n M.O. prodded around me for a 



The Push and After 249 

bit, and gave me a cigarette, I remember. I 
remember hearing him say: "Oh! well, you' re all 
right." And then I must have had another doze. 

Next thing I remember I was lying in a right- 
hand lower stretcher in a motor ambulance, and 
soon after that I was in bed in the Field Ambulance 

at . The same night I came on here, the Field 

Ambulance being pretty busy and full up. It's 
only a few miles off. I know there was snow all 
round when I was being lifted out of the motor 
ambulance into the hall here. 

And then comfort, and cleanliness and quiet; 
most wonderful peace, and English nursing sisters. 
My goodness, aren't English nursing sisters lovely? 
English women, all of 'em, for that matter. And 
they say there are still some men at home who 
don't want to join! Seems queer to me. 

Well, Lawson is rapidly developing writer's 
cramp, and I don't wonder at it. 

And so I'm to move on somewhere else soon 
from here. In any case, you understand, don't 
you, that I'm all right, wanting for nothing, 
and most kindly looked after. I'll write again 
very soon, and whatever you do, don't have the 
smallest feeling of anxiety about your 

" Temporary Gentleman" 



BLIGHTY 

This is to be evacuation day. A dozen officers 
and nearly a hundred other ranks are to leave this 
place to-day for one or other of the bases. The 
life of a permanent official in one of these Clearing 
Stations must be curious, handling as he does a 
never-ending stream of the flotsam and jetsam 
of the great war. The war knocks chips off us, 
and as we are broken we stream in through the 
hospitable portals of this beautifully organised 
and managed place; are put in plaster of Paris, 
so to say, and off we go again to another place to 
be further doctored; the more newly chipped 
arriving by one gate, as we go trickling out by 
another. And this process is continuous. Along 
the British front alone a score or more of men are 
bowled over every hour. In a place like this the 
process is brought home to one. 

So, too, is the ordered precision and efficacy of 
the system of dealing with the wreckage. It is 
wonderfully methodical and well thought out. 

250 



Blighty 251 

And over all, as I told you before, broods the 
spirit of benevolent reticence, which makes one 
feel a little like a registered parcel entrusted to 
a particularly efficient postal service. "When are 
we going?" Benevolent smile. "Presently; pre- 
sently. ' ' " What base are we going to ? " Benevo- 
lent smile. "You'll see by and by." "About 
how long shall we be on the journey ? ' ' Benevolent 
smile. "Oh! you'll be made quite comfortable 
on the journey. Don't worry about that." 
"Well, I'm very much better this morning, 
don't you think?" Benevolent smile. "Do you 
think I shall be able to sit up in a day or two?" 
Benevolent smile. "We shall see." 

So it is always. I dare say the thirst of patients 
for information often becomes very trying to the 
authorities. But they never in any circumstances 
show any impatience. They never omit the 
benevolent smile. And they never, never, for one 
instant, relax the policy of benevolent reticence; 
never. The man next to me is very keen about 
his temperature ; it is, I believe, the chief symptom 
of his particular trouble. But the bland familiar 
smile is all the reply he can ever get to his most 
crafty efforts to ascertain if it is higher or lower. I 
haven't the slightest doubt it is all part of a 



252 A ••Temporary Gentleman** 

carefully devised policy making for our benefit; 
but I wouldn't mind betting the man in the next 
bed sends his temperature up by means of his 
quite fruitless efforts to ascertain that it has gone 
down. 

Later. 

Here's another strange handwriting for you. 

The present writer is Lieut. R , whose left 

arm has had a lot more shrap. through it than 
my right got, and who has kindly lent me the 
services of his right. My left-handed writing is 
still, as you will have noted, a bit too suggestive 
of a cryptogram in Chinese. We are lying oppo- 
site one another in very comfortable bunks in the 

Red Cross train, making from to a base, we 

don't yet know which. There are nearly 500 
''evacuation cases" on board this train. Its pro- 
gress is leisurely, but I believe we are to reach our 
destination round about breakfast time to-morrow. 
We found books and magazines in the train when 
we came on board. That's a kindly thought, 
isn't it? They bear the stamp of the Camps 
Library. The doctors and nurses get round 
among us on the train just as freely as in hospital. 
The whole thing is a triumph of good management. 



Blighty 253 

While we were lying in our stretchers waiting for 
the train, having arrived at the station in motor 
ambulances from the Clearing Station, we saw miles 
of trains pass laden with every conceivable sort of 
thing. for the French firing line; from troops to 
tin-tacks; a sort of departmental store on wheels; 
an unending cinematograph film, which took over 
an hour to roll past us, and showed no sign of 
ending then. All the French troops, with their 
cigarettes and their chocolate, had kindly, jovial 
greetings for the stretchered rows of our chaps as 
we lay in our blankets on the platform waiting for 
our train, especially the jolly, rollicking Zouaves. 
Good luck, and a pleasant rest ; quick recovery, and 
— as I understand it — return to the making of glory, 
they wished us, and all with an obviously com- 
radely sincerity and play of facial expression, 
hands and shoulders, which made nothing of 
difference of language. And our chaps, much 
more clumsily, but with equal goodwill, did their 
level best to respond. I think the spirit of their 
replies was understood. Yes, I feel sure of that. 
The war's a devastating business, no doubt; but 
it has introduced a spirit of comradeship between 
French and English such as peace could never 
give. 



254 A "Temporary Gentleman" 

Next morning. 

You will forgive the left-handedness of the 
writing, won't you? My friend opposite has had 
a good deal of pain during the night, and I cannot 
ask him to write for me now. It was a strange 
night, and I don't think I'll ever forget it, though 
there's really nothing to tell; "Nothing to write 
home about," as the men say. I didn't sleep 
much, but I had quite a comfortable night, all the 
same, and plenty to think about. When the 
train lay still between stations, as it sometimes 
did, I could hear snatches of talk from different 
parts of the train itself — doctors, nurses, orderlies, 
patients, railway officials, and so on. Then 
perhaps another train would rumble along and 
halt near us, and there would be talk between 
people of the two trains : French, English, and the 
queer jumble of a patois that the coming together 
of the twain in war has evolved. Also, there was 
the English which remains English, its speaker not 
having a word of any other tongue, but which 
yet, on the face of it, somehow, tells one it is 
addressed to someone who must understand it 
from its tone or not at all. 

"Oh, that's it, is it? Cigarettes? You bet. 
Here, catch, old chap ! Bong, tres bong Woodbine. 



Blighty 255 

What ho! Same to you, old chap, an' many of 
'em. Yes, yes; we'll soon be back again, an' then 
we'll give the blighters what for, eh? Chocolate, 
eh? Oh, mercy, mercy! No, no; no more; we 
got plenty grub; much pang, savvy. You're a 
brick, you are. You bong, tres bong; compree? 
Hallo! Off again! Well, so long, old sport! 
Good luck! Bong charnce! See ye 'gain some 
time ! B ong sworr ! ' ' 

There's a poor chap in the bunk under mine 
who's been delirious most of the night. He looks 

such a child. A second lieutenant of the s; 

badly shaken up in a mine explosion, and bombed 
afterwards. The M.O. says he'll get through all 
right. He's for Blighty, no doubt. Odd, isn't 
it? This time to-morrow he may be in England, 
or mighty near it. England — what an extra- 
ordinary long way off it seems to me. There have 
been some happenings in my life since I was in 
England; and as for the chap I was before the war, 
upon my word, I can hardly remember the fellow. 
Pretty sloppy, wasn't he? Seems to me I must 
have been a good deal of a slacker; hadn't had 
much to do with real things then. 

We know at last where we're bound for; in fact, 
we're there. The train has been backing: and 



256 A "Temporary Gentleman M 

filling through the streets of the outskirts of 
Havre for the last half -hour or more. But last 
evening, when I was writing, we could only ascer- 
tain that we were going to . Benevolent 

smiles, you know. 

It's frightfully interesting to see the streets. 
I see them through the little narrow flap at the 
top of my window that's meant to open. It 
seems quite odd to see women walking to and 
fro; and row after row of roofs and windows, all 
unbroken. No signs of shell-shock here. But 
on the other side of the train, nearest the harbour, 
one sees acres and acres of war material; I mean 
really acres and acres of rations, barbed wire, 
stores of all kinds. 

There's a sort of bustle going on in the train. I 
think we must be near the end, so I'll put my note- 
book away. 

IO.45 A.M. 

We are in what they call the Officers' Huts, on 
some quay or another. It's a miniature hospital 
or clearing station, built of wood, and very nicely 
fitted up. Sitting-room at one end, then beds, 
and then baths and cooking-place and offices; all 
bright and shining and beautifully clean, with 



Blighty 257 

Red Cross nurses, doctors, orderlies, and no end 
of benevolent smiles. They've taken our tempera- 
tures and fixed us up very comfortably, and some- 
body's started a gramophone, and I've just had 
a cup of the glutinous, milky stuff I used to hate, 
you remember. I don't hate such things nowa- 
days; not really, you know; but I pretend I don't 
care much about 'em for the sake of the virtuous 
glow it gives to take 'em. 

Everyone has asked everyone else where we are 
going next, and everyone has been given benevo- 
lent smiles and subsided into a Camps Library 
magazine or book. The sitting-up cases are 
pottering about in the sitting-room, where there 
are basket chairs and the gramophone. I can see 
them through the open door. The nurses have 
fixed jolly little curtains and things about, so 
that the place looks very homely. I gather it's a 
sort of rest-house, or waiting-place, where cases 
can be put, and stay put, till arrangements have 
been made for their admission into the big hos- 
pitals, or wherever they are to go. We have all 
been separately examined by the Medical Officer. 
My arm is so much better, I think it must be 
practically well. I don't know about the leg. I 

asked the M.O. — an awfully decent chap — to try 
17 



258 A •• Temporary Gentleman" 

to arrange things for me so that I should not be 
cut adrift from my own Battalion, and he said he 
thought that would be all right. 

3.3O P.M. 

I'm for Blighty. The M.O. came and sat on my 
bed just now and told me. He certainly is a 
decent chap. He said the Medical Board had no 
hesitation at all about my case, and that I was to 
cross to England to-night. But he said I need not 
worry about my Battalion. He was awfully good 
about it ; and he's giving me a letter to a brother of 
his in London. He thinks I shall be able to get 
back to my own Battalion all right, and he thinks 
I shall be ready for duty much quicker by going 
right through to Blighty than by waiting here. But 
what do you think of it? Fancy going to Blighty; 
and to-night, mind you! I'd never dreamt of it. 
And what about poor old "A" Company? It's a 
queer feeling. We've all been sorted out now; 
the goats from the sheep. I suppose it's a case 
of the worst-chipped crockery for Blighty, and 
the rest for tinkering here. But I can't help 
thinking a week, or two, at the outside, will put 
me right. . . . Here come Army Forms to be 
signed. 



Blighty 259 

9.3O P.M. 

In bed on board the Red Cross ship. All 
spotless white enamel and electric light, and spot- 
lessly-aproned nurses, just as in hospital. I've 
just been dressed for the night ; clean bandages and 
everything comfortable. From the last benevo- 
lent smile I elicited I shouldn't be surprised if we 
weighed anchor round about midnight; but I 
may be quite wrong. Anyhow, I feel remark- 
ably comfortable. I think there must have been 
something specially comforting in the medicine 
I had when my bandages were changed. I shall 
sleep like a top. I don't think I've quite got the 
hang yet of the fact that I am actually bound for 
Blighty. But there it is; I'm on the ship, and I 
suppose it's on the cards I may see you before 
this scribble of mine can reach you by post. In 
which case, it seems rather waste of time writing at 
all, doesn't it? I think I'll go to sleep. I haven't 
slept since the night before last. That boy I told 
you of who was bombed, after being in a mine 
explosion, is sleeping like an infant in the next 
cot but one to mine. Nice-looking chap. I'm 
glad he's sleeping; and I bet somebody will be 
glad to see him in Blighty to-morrow. To- 
morrow ! Just fancy that ! 



260 A "Temporary Gentleman " 

Next day. 

To-day's the day. When I woke this morning I 
had glimpses, as' the ship rose and fell, of a green 
shore showing through the portholes on the far 
side of the deck. That was the Isle of Wight. 
Had a magnificent sleep all night ; only opened my 
eyes two or three times. We were rather a long 
time getting in. Then came Medical Officers of 
the Home Service; and with surprisingly few 
benevolent smiles — not that they lack benev- 
olence, at all — I learned that I was for Lon- 
don. It hardly seemed worth while to write 
any more, and I could not get off the ship to 
send a wire. 

Now I am in a Red Cross division of an express 
train bound for Waterloo. I'll send you a wire 
from there when I know what hospital I am for. 
Shan't know that till we reach Waterloo. Mean- 
time — that's Winchester we've just passed. Old 
England looks just the same. There is a little 
snow lying on the high ground round Winchester. 
It looks the same — yes, in a way; and in another 
way it never will look just the same again to me. 
Never just the same, I think. It will always 
mean a jolly lot more to me than it ever did before. 
Perhaps I'll be able to tell you about that when 



Blighty 261 

we meet. I find I can't write it. Queer 
thing j isn't it, that just seeing these fields 
from the windows of a train should bring the 
water to one's eyes? Very queer! One kind 
of sees, it all through a picture of the trenches, 
you know. 

4 'The Old Peacemaker" didn't tell me, but I 
know now that nearly half "A" Company are 
casualties; and there's a good many "gone West." 
Poor Taffy's gone. Such a clever lad, Taffy. 
My Platoon won't be quite the same again, will 
it? Platoon Sergeant, one other Sergeant, two 
Corporals, and a lot of men gone. We were in 
front, you see. Oh! I know there's nothing to 
grieve about, really. Petticoat Lane's behind 
our front now, thank goodness. That'll save 
many a good man from "going West" between 
now and the end of the war. 

I'm not grieving, but it makes a difference, just 
as England is different. Everything must be 
different now. It can't be the same again, ever, 
after one's been in the trenches. If Germany 
wants to boast, she can boast that she's altered 
the world for us. She certainly has. It can never 
be the same again. But I think it will be found, 
by and by, she has altered it in a way she never 



262 A "Temporary Gentleman •• 

meant. Of course, I don't know anything much 
about it; just the little bit in one's own Brigade, 
you know. But it does seem to me, from the 
little I've seen, that where Germany meant to 
break us, she has made us infinitely stronger 
than we were before. Look at our fellows ! Each 
one is three times the man he was before the war. 
The words " fighting for England" had next to no 
meaning for me before August, 191 4. But now! 
that's why these fields look different, why England 
can never again look the same to me as it did 
before. I know now that this England is part of 
me, or I'm part of it. I know the meaning of 
England, and I swear I never did before. Why, 
you know, the very earth of it — well, when I 
think how the Boche has torn and ravaged all 
before him over there, and then think of our 
England, of what the Hun would do here, if 
he got half a chance. . . . It's as though Eng- 
land were one's mother, and some swine were 

to 

But it's no good. I can't write about it. I'll 
try to tell you. But, do you know, it wasn't 
till I saw these fields that the notion came over 
me that I'm sort of proud and glad to have 
these blessed wounds ; glad to have been knocked 



Blighty 263 

about a bit. I wonder whether you and Mother 
will be glad, too; I somehow think you will — 
for your 

' ' Temporary Gentleman. ' ' 



THE END 



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